No One Can Pronounce My Name

by Rakesh Satyal

  They had put up flyers that any Thanksgiving strays were welcome at their place, so the other attendees made a motley assortment—three undergrads and one taciturn grad student. The undergrads were all freshmen, all young women, all as clueless as Prashant. The taciturn grad student, Oleg, was from Warsaw. He was very thin and his hair was insane, a copse of curls set so thickly that they all looked tangled with one another. He was an unabashed flirt with all three of the young women, who politely rejected his attempts until Oleg silenced himself with a pair of pumpkin pie slices.

  The entire evening felt slapdash, and Prashant welcomed it. It was nice to be in a neutral space on campus, surrounded by academics yet not at risk of running into Kavita. She had e-mailed him a few days ago, but his response? “I can’t—homework.” She had probably decamped to Chicago for the weekend, and Prashant, between bites of butternut squash gratin, let himself envision what her Thanksgiving looked like. He imagined a look of satisfaction crossing her face while she savored a creamy spoonful of buttery mashed potatoes.

  “So, Mr. Chowdery,” Professor Dominick said, “has our fair campus been to your liking thus far?” Even though he had worked several blue-collar jobs, he spoke with a stilted air.

  “I feel very at home,” Prashant said. He didn’t know that this was how he felt until he said it. The consciousness that his rightful place was here, the academic promise that he exhibited with every meticulously composed problem set, gave him a sense of belonging that he had never had before.

  “That’s so lovely to hear,” Gina said, looking up just briefly from her daughter, who lay cradled in her arms like a scepter. “Destiny brought you here, then.”

  “Indeed,” Professor Dominick said, cutting through his adobo-rubbed turkey. “But don’t get too comfortable. That’s when you let your guard down and your grades start slipping. You’re here for only four years.”

  Oleg made an intentionally loud clearing of his throat, revealing to them that he had spent not just grad school but his undergrad years on campus.

  “Well, true,” Professor Dominick replied to this, swiping another forkful of turkey into his mouth. “You could be like my dear protégé Oleg here and parlay your avid facility with thermodynamics into the hell of being my TA.”

  “I’ll take your hell over a literary heaven any day,” Oleg said, clearly brightening at the chance to be engaged in conversation once more.

  Clara, one of the young women at the table, piped up: “I happen to be an English major, and I’m very proud of it.” Her voice contained an air of indignation that was at odds with her otherwise reserved appearance. Prashant realized that her schoolmarmish outfit was the result of hipster posturing, not a poor sense of style.

  “Let’s see what you think when you graduate and can’t get a job,” Oleg said.

  “Now, now,” Professor Dominick said sternly, though laughing. “There’s no need to be rude, Oleg.”

  “Yeah, especially when you’re just a TA,” Clara said. She swept her fingers through the air to form a Stop sign, the universal gesture for “Talk to the hand.”

  Oleg pressed on. “Do me a favor and try to learn some computer languages if you’re going to be an English major,” he said. “At least some basic HTML, if not Python and Joomla.”

  “Oleg,” Gina said, looking up from the baby again, but with fire in her eyes. “Please have some respect. This is a Thanksgiving dinner to which you have been invited.”

  “I’m just trying to be helpful,” he said.

  Prashant noticed, around the lip of the table, the flask jutting out of Oleg’s pocket. Given that the dinner was mainly composed of underage students, there was no wine or liquor offered, but Oleg had clearly seen this as a surmountable obstacle. Oddly, Prashant found himself sympathetic. After all, he himself had been the fraught center of attention at a party mere weeks ago.

  “I think they’re both right,” Prashant interjected. “I admire Clara for pursuing literature, since it’s probably her passion.” He tilted his gaze toward Clara, who met the gesture with a guarded acknowledgment, as if she thought he was joking. “But—and I don’t say this just because I’m studying chemistry—I do worry that, as Professor Dominick says, if I don’t acknowledge a real world that will want actual ‘marketable’ skills from me”—he found himself about to make the air quotes before he did so—“my time here, however enjoyable, will be for nothing.”

  “Well said, young man,” Professor Dominick responded. “Now, it’s time for some jazz.”

  They were all escorted from the dining room to a parlor that lay beyond two large oak doors. From one corner, an old record player scratched out 1920s music. A glittering assortment of tchotchkes covered every surface, a collection of fake jewels and mirrored boxes and pewter figurines. Half a dozen large-faced clocks stared from various corners. No two couches in the room matched. Professor Dominick started doing a loose-limbed dance, his arms swooping, Gina following with their rocket-baby. Professor Dominick switched out the record, and John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme bounced off the walls.

  Prashant was dancing stupidly, but he felt more relaxed than he had in quite some time. Even the girls seemed to warm to Oleg when they saw his embarrassing attempts at playing an air saxophone. Soon, they were all bouncing around, leaving the cliché of the too-cool-for-school college student behind. It wasn’t until Gina made a swift exit to deposit the baby into her upstairs crib that things came to an end, and they were all soon filing out of the massive front door laden with foiled leftovers that caught the glint of the moonlight.

  Prashant didn’t notice until they were halfway back to campus, wending their way past more looming mansions, that he and Clara had separated slightly from the others. Her double-breasted blazer and roomy skirt caught the wind, as did her asymmetrical, curly hair, and he felt a small shock run through his crotch.

  “Thanks for sticking up for me back there,” she said, dipping her head into the wind and avoiding his gaze as if she were wearing a lorgnette.

  “No problem,” he said, flatly. He felt his outspokenness from earlier dissipate like their breath in the cold. Clenching his fists, he tried not to let the moment slip. “To be honest, I’ve been thinking of switching to English myself. It’s just that, well, I’m Indian, and I’d be killed by firing squad if I don’t study science.”

  “You shouldn’t subscribe to such horrible cultural stereotypes,” she said, a smile still peeling her lips back.

  “In that case, wanna make out?”

  It popped right out of him, completely unbidden, and he felt himself grow hot in the middle again, this time with embarrassment. Within seconds, she was teasing his tongue into hers with the alacrity of a seasoned professional.

  Clara’s last name was Windsor, and she was one of a long line of extraordinarily wealthy patrons of the university who had funded the construction of several buildings on campus—including one of the buildings that housed Prashant’s statistics class. He didn’t have to hunt for this information; she told him outright once he saw her dorm room, a laughably large haven high atop one of the oldest Gothic buildings on campus. They kicked off their shoes as they stumbled through the doorway, something he’d seen in romantic comedies but that he didn’t think actually happened in real life. Another thing he didn’t think happened in real life was the ease with which he kissed her. He wasn’t 100 percent sure, but he was pretty sure that he was doing well.

  He started to slide his fingers under her bra, hoping to see if her nipples were hard, then realized that this was a total porn star move and pulled back. He knew many guys who had botched their chances with girls on campus simply because their porn education had been received with utter disgust. Clara felt his hesitation and brought his hand back to her chest. Soon, they were on her bed in nothing but their socks (her comforter oddly smelled like Lucky Charms). Hers were white and frilly, a hipster’s delicates. Whatever her privileged background, she had the lighting favored by students on college campuses everywhe
re—white Christmas lights—and their bodies glowed under dozens of pixie-like pinpoints tacked around her bay window.

  Clara seemed perfectly in her element, and she showed absolutely no shame about being naked in front of him. Prashant reproached himself for having thought her plain before. Underneath her affected schoolmarm chic, she was beautiful. He had always convinced himself that he liked slender girls with full chests—porn caricatures—but now that he saw the soft roundness of Clara’s curves, the slightly gangly but appealing spill of her chest, the fullness in her tummy above her pubic hair, he realized that he had avoided an entire realm of sexual fantasy simply because he had deemed it too ordinary. In reality, it was extraordinary. And it was extraordinary that this—being here, with her—was reality at all.

  III

  AS YOUR BODY AGES it acquires new sensations, very few of which are actually pleasant. Frederick’s body worsened from year to year, to the point that at least once a day when he noticed a pain, almost a burning, along the line where his belly sagged over his belt. When he was younger, he had no belly to speak of, his stomach’s tautness barely touching a shirt’s fabric back then. These days, he was conscious of how every part of his stomach ached, from belly button to love handles to coarse happy trail. Meanwhile, all of the other parts could ache, too. Every knuckle contained a universe of hurt. He could feel every bone of his foot when he climbed steps. His lower back felt like someone was pushing it all the time. The older he got, the more flesh he had, and that flesh was full of nerves, and those nerves were conspiring to tell him this: Just because there is more of you doesn’t mean that there is more of you to love.

  Most of the time, he wasn’t as gloomy as all that. Even during his darkest moments, when he sat on the couch with a book sliding from his fingers and his eyes fixed on the ceiling, he knew that there was some part of him—a part that true depressives didn’t have—that felt hopeful and resilient. Honestly, if it weren’t for that inexorable optimism, he probably would have killed himself years ago. He’d lost three—four?—friends to suicide, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel such despair in any legitimate way.

  He spent most of his life convincing himself that he was young, and for many years, certain aspects of his appearance allowed this delusion to persist. As a blond, he skirted the presence of gray hairs because they played hide-and-seek so furtively among their flaxen peers. He had oddly healthy skin, so smooth that people always asked him what moisturizer he used. For a long time, he looked younger than his age; at forty, he still looked as if he were thirty.

  Something changed during his late forties. Because he had always been blessed with natural youth, he didn’t know what to do to create the illusion of it. He refused to get plastic surgery. He had seen his share of men whose faces were pulled into masks; the only thing he detested more than a woman who penciled in her eyebrows was a man who did the same thing. He had always assumed that his body would continue to be spry if he kept the right attitude. But in recent years, no matter how happy a demeanor he effected, his body charged ahead, finally accepting its deterioration even though he would never have agreed to such a thing. And so, in short stabs to his underbelly, in the pregnant flicker of a vein in his arm, in the heat of indigestion that felt increasingly like heart trouble, he came to see that he was getting permanently, irreversibly older—even though he had accomplished very little of what, in his youth, he thought he would accomplish.

  * * *

  He had grown up in Youngstown, Ohio, which his own father referred to as a “shithole” even though both his father and mother had been born and raised in the city. At least his father had refused to join the hordes of people working in the steel industry and opted to become a car salesman. He worked at a Ford dealership where he had a facility for selling vehicles but also for spending his earnings on copious amounts of booze. Frederick’s mother had taken a job at a jewelry store but seemed to have no great sense of style, always choosing the gaudy beaded necklace over the carefully appointed brooch. The great irony was that she, who spent her time among women who couldn’t afford Hollywood luxury but tried to evoke it, had no real understanding of that world herself. Frederick, on the contrary, had a firmer sense of style; he was the one who snuck out to catch screenings of old movies, Marlene Dietrich and Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn.

  Frederick had the innate sense that he was going to get away from this place and go to New York City. This was why he took the other boys’ insults and punches and the teachers who gave him lower grades when he wrote too passionately about Lady Macbeth or Daisy Buchanan: because he knew that this was all a means to an end.

  His parents never expected him to go to college. His older brother, Simon, on whom they had used up all of their energy, had graduated high school and become the manager of the local Big Boy, which he ran amiably and proudly, white apron tight over his chest and his hair closely cropped. Frederick’s whole family knew that he was different—their eyes followed his elaborate hand gestures when he spoke like they were watching a pilot do a loop-de-loop in the sky—but they didn’t address it, nor did he say anything. He was handsome, better-looking than any of them, but there was a grace in his movements that prevented people from commenting on it, afraid that merely acknowledging beauty would make them queer, too. Many years later, he would be reminded of this when supermodels talked about their gangly period, those clumsy days before a scout happened upon their otherworldly beauty in a mall and told them that their bony ankles, sunken cheeks, crooked teeth, and frightening height were, in fact, assets. There was no such scout in Youngstown. Frederick was never approached about his supple skin, the patches on his cheeks like liquid rouge, the mount of his thick hair, or the grace of his gait. Instead, Frederick, ever aware that he deserved something besides his hometown, was his own scout.

  His parents did not object when he told them that he was going to New York, as if they had always assumed that he would leave them after high school and that the city would be his only destination. In 1980, he packed two duffel bags and took three trains, each filled with more and more people of color, something that he had experienced only tangentially, however racially charged Youngstown had been. It was on the last of these trains that he saw a lanky black man, no older than twenty-five, board the train and plop himself onto a nearby seat, his tight clothes highlighting the bulges in his chest and crotch. Frederick had never allowed himself to think of a black man as attractive. He had known, even then, that his idea of black men was as fetishistic as his parents’ was narrow-minded. So when he saw this man, undoubtedly beautiful but not a disco boy or a model, he realized that he could make his desires concrete.

  This was the first confirmation that, unlike the bleach-blond, lithe things that he saw on porn tapes—their groins crossed by tan lines—he had a predilection for men of color. He knew that this would be the most upsetting thing to his parents—that if they knew that he was leaving not just to be gay but also to be a gay man sleeping with these men, they would seize him by the collar and throw him back in his room until he assumed his role as assistant manager at Big Boy or toiled in the spitballed silence of being a substitute teacher.

  They hadn’t known this because he hadn’t known it. It had taken a random man on Amtrak to reveal to him his own inclinations.

  In fact, it would be months before he would even kiss a man. First, he had to sort out the terrifying steps of settling into city life. He found a dingy studio in the West Village almost by accident: he was helping an old woman who had fallen over on Seventh Avenue, so laden was she with a grocery bag of potatoes and medications, and when he was on her doorstep on Charles Street, she revealed herself as the landlady of the residence and offered him a unit, which was one floor underground and which dispensed roaches like a pinball machine. Yet it was a godsend: New York at that time was a war zone, leering men cascading by his window every night, their voices riding up the sides of buildings and into the thick night air. He would perch on his rickety couch
like a Catholic kneeling at confession, gazing upward through his windows and observing people from below, their wingtip shoes and chains and the moonlit feathers of their hair. He felt his lust as if it were a stash of money in his pocket, something valuable but daunting to transact. If he gave it away and got something in return, he wasn’t sure how valuable that something might be to him.

  He busied himself during the day looking for a job, which he found in a deli. The irony of making sandwiches, given his brother’s line of work, was not lost on him. He loved it, though. As demanding as his customers could be, he had a fondness for them, their quirks building his impression of the city face by face and gripe by gripe. They were a varied bunch: grandmothers and addicts, effete painters wearing berets, rabbis clutching worn copies of the Talmud. His bosses were a husband-and-wife team from Malta, and they both seemed grateful for him because he came across like their son. He would take himself out for a drink—just one—at a bar adjacent to the gay ones, steeling himself to venture Out but stopping short. One time, he wavered outside Stonewall after a strong martini, but after getting an arch glance from a gray-haired older gentleman, he retreated to a bar where women’s hips rubbed against his back.

  In the meantime, he auditioned. He knew how completely naïve he was in thinking that he would land a gig, but he thought that acknowledging his naïveté would put him one step ahead of most people and lead to success. (Nothing envisioned a future more inaccurately than naïveté.) As if it were a talisman, he treasured the fable of Betty Buckley, who had stumbled off a bus from Texas in 1969, walked by an open call for 1776, and booked the role of Martha Jefferson immediately; she had been a famous Broadway star ever since. Every time he saw an audition in the paper and showed up, his hair parted and his black clothes laundered with his last batch of laundry quarters, he assumed that his perfect pitch and his handsomely ruddy face would pave his path to the stage.