Red Earth and Pouring Rain

by Vikram Chandra

  So I take Sarah Nussenbaum to L’Auberge, where she whispers that she feels underdressed and I suppress my urgent desire to tell her to stop whining and instead ply her freely with expensive red wine. After a while her cheeks get flushed and she starts talking about how it’s great that Ling and she and I are friends, how much it means to her and we should always keep in touch. I murmur, “Anything for you, Sarah,” and narrow my eyes at her above the rim of my glass. Then she talks about something else and I nod and feed her pastry from my plate. In the limo on the way home she turns eagerly to me when I put a hand on her neck, and she runs her hands over my forehead and ears as we kiss, and her mouth tastes of wine but I break away suddenly, saying “I don’t think this is such a good idea, Sarah.” She shrinks away to her corner, and I can see that she wants to ask, then why all this? but she’s way too smart and proud. “I’m sorry” I say.

  After I drop her off I let the limousine go and trudge through the empty streets, trying to remember the exact state of my body and brain as we kissed, but all I can remember is my usual unbounded excitement when I’m anywhere near Sarah and an equally strong anxiety, a nervousness that afflicts me so I shake. As I go from shadow into light, I seem to remember that my hands shook through her hair, but I’m almost certain I’m inventing this as I try to see it again. Suddenly I’m in front of her house, not Sarah’s, I mean, but the abode of Mercy Fuller Cunningham. In some hazy hour of self-deception, I’ve casually asked and looked in phone books and maybe even followed her white Audi long enough to get a general idea of where she lives, and now I’m there: “CUNNINGHAM,” a brass nameplate says. Nameplates are signs, I remember Ling saying, because they communicate one sort of information, while flags are symbols, because they stand for a host of things. What sort of flag would Mercy fly, I wonder, as I work my way around the large white concrete house, through hedges and over grass. At the back, I find a window, high above me and curtained, which I know instantly is hers. It is very late, and a few lights burn feverishly in the distance, throwing up halos. I roll in the mud under her window, crushing little yellow flowers, and when I kneel finally, my arms clutched around my belly, sweat and the liquid from plants pouring across my lips, I can feel the moon on my face. It hangs above me as I totter from tree to tree on my way home.

  The next day at breakfast, I said to my parents: “What are we?”

  “What?” my mother says, putting down her newspaper. They’re both looking at me with a certain eagerness, we can deal with this, we’re both psychiatrists. Existential questions are what they live for, and they’re especially partial to teenage angst.

  “I mean, what are we? Are we German, or English, or Dutch, or what? Wasn’t Grandpa’s father from Germany?”

  “Your great-grandfather spoke German, but I think he was born in New England,” my father says.

  “Why this sudden interest?” my mother says.

  They’re both a little puzzled and intrigued. The place of the human in the cosmos they can talk about, it’s how they make their bread and butter, but ethnic stuff is a touch primitive and makes them uncomfortable.

  “Oh, nothing,” I say, “I just wondered.”

  “Mostly German, a little English, some Dutch, some French, I should think,” my father says.

  “No Italian?” I ask.

  “It’s possible,” my mother says. “My side spent a lot of time in New York.”

  “Have to go,” I say. I walk to school feeling my body move, trying to see if there’s a little strut in it. The truth is that in the sunshine of the day I’m a little ashamed and more than a little frightened by what I’d done the night before. Rolling in the bushes is extreme for anyone, but me? In tenth grade I wrote a paper on the invention of romantic love in the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. So now I want a genetic reason for my behavior, some dimly remembered racial memory that had awakened and pushed me headlong into lunacy.

  In English, Mercy Fuller Cunningham is talking, in a breathless tone of horror, about some weird animal that rolled around in her yard and smashed hedges.

  “Be careful,” I say, as I walk to my desk. “It could be the Snow Beast.” Raising my hands over my head, back humped, fingers hooked: “Arrrrrr. Ahhaarrr-aarrr.”

  She looks at me, puzzled. I drop the Snow Beast, walk around her and swing into my desk in one fluid movement. As Mrs. Christiansen walks in, Ling leans over to me. “Why are you walking like that?” I shrug.

  That day, after class, I walk next to Mercy Fuller Cunningham in the hall, making conversation about movies. “Risky Business, yeah,” I say, “that was totally cool, but I liked Top Gun better.” I know, I know: I had an anxiety attack when I heard they were going to make a movie which featured jets, motorcycles, and Tom Cruise. Ling said that the average teenage boy could get his hormone level maladjusted just from looking at the ad. But now the situation was desperate, and I think I would have raved about John Wayne if Mercy Fuller Cunningham had given me half an opening. So we casually walked into the cafeteria and I casually kept up my stream of carefully middle-to-just-above-middlebrow, not-too-radical banter, and casually we stood in line and casually I got some milk and stuff, and we walked outside to the patio, and she said, want to sit here? and we sat on red-and-green concrete picnic tables, and I casually opened my milk, one-handed, and all around us heads turned.

  See, I don’t know what it was like at yours, but at Hilltop, there were the Punkers and the Trendies, the Lot Dead Stoners, the Ethnics, the Jocks and the Cheers, the Nerds, the Super Nerds, the Artos, the Jesus Gnomes, and the Nobodies. Sometimes a Punker would go out with a New-Wavish Trendy, and sometimes a Nerd would sneak a smoke with one of the Dead, but mostly the caste rules were maintained with slavish obedience and enforced by vicious ridicule. You were judged for everything and could be ostracized for anything, and I mean anything, the shoes you wore, your parents, your car, your religion, your clothes, especially if you were a woman. So when I sit down to lunch with Mercy Fuller Cunningham a ripple passes among the assembled multitudes —here is a confirmed Arto Super Nerd breaking bread with the most exalted and rosy-breasted of the Cheers: Damn, I say, old man, what is this modern world coming to? Jolly bad form, what?

  But I ignore the giggles and the sniggers, and actually exult in them, because for my passion I am enduring the slings and gibes of unbelievable conformity. I am able to endure anything. During the next few weeks I spend all my money on clothes, and wearing only underwear, lift weights in front of the mirror. I practice saying “Yo!” I eat with Mercy often and try to make conversation with her friends, all of whom react to me with careful politeness. Mercy always introduces me: this is my smart friend Tom, he’s a poet. I get the feeling that this just heightens their ineffable feeling of superiority. And sometimes I just cannot believe these people, and at these times I get the feeling that Mercy is embarrassed by them. Like there’s this one time, lunch again, and Salma walks by, Salma is this Pakistani girl, a power at math, solves differential equations in her head, and she has black, amazingly beautiful hair, that she lets hang in a thick coil to below her knees, and Salma walks on by, and Mercy’s friends Mary and Ellen and Bill and Steve, all of them bat their hands in front of their noses, smiling. “What?” I say, feeling this nervous smile on my lips.

  “Don’t you know?” Craig says. “They never wash it, the hair.” Craig and John are these two handsome buzz-cut black guys, both football players, and now both of them are sitting there smiling at me. I have a mad impulse to lean over and grab them by the collars and shout, what the fuck are you laughing at? but Mercy puts a hand on my arm, under the table, and so I sit there and they start talking about something else.

  I want to tell Ling about this, but instead I talk to her about end-of-term papers or some such nonsense. She wants to come over and pick up a reference book I have, and I try to put her off, I’ll bring it tomorrow to school, and she says, what is your problem? so I say, all right. At my house, on the stairs up to my room, her nose begins to twi
tch, and a full three feet before she reaches the door she bursts out, “What is that smell? Incense?”

  She walks into the room and stops short. The walls are covered with Italian madonnas, sad-eyed women with pure, spiritual expressions and incredible sexual potential.

  “Oh, Tom,” Ling says. “Oh, oh, Tom.”

  From the next day on, she starts to leave Xeroxed articles in my desk, articles with two-part titles like The Making and Breaking of Marilyn Monroe: A Post-feminist Perspective and Men, Women, Sex, and War: Gender Politics and Violence among the Kikuyu and Complex Dream or Simple Need: Towards a Bio-genetic Understanding of the Male Sexual Impulse (the last by a woman named Emmaline Shakti Sharpstown). I want to tell Ling, thanks, but I don’t need these, I understand only too well the shoddy symbolisms of my psyche, the grunting subterfuges of my id, but I am too embarrassed to even talk about it.

  So the days go by and my GPA plummets and Mrs. Christiansen gives back my papers with large contemptuous C’s scrawled across the front, and pretty soon the whole world knows I’m going mad. I actually hear a pimply little freshman tell her equally pimply friend, “That’s the guy whose obsessing over Mercy Fuller Cunningham —he’s gone crazy.” I walk down the halls in my new Reeboks and my new haircut like some grotesque marked by fire: people stop talking when I draw near, and will look anywhere but into my eyes. And while this is happening I get a sense of some weird empathy from the Ethnics —I turn around in the cafeteria one day and there’s Muhammed Ziai, a sophomore, the only kid in school of Iranian descent, and he turns away quickly but not before I see this sad smile on his face. This keeps on happening to me, Pakistanis, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Cubans stare at me absently and then flick their eyes away. Meanwhile, I wonder if Mercy Fuller Cunningham is aware of all this, and surely she must be, but every time I make some feeble effort to break the spell she does something that pulls me right back in, all these little touches and smiles and I didn’t see you today, Tommy, I missed you, all so innocent that then and now I waver between thinking of her as the proverbial cock-goading bitch and a poor misunderstood generous girl trapped by her beauty.

  So on it goes. I cycle between depression and expansive happiness, and the sight of lovers, of any two people, arouses in me a morbid, hateful jealousy. Even the sight of a bleached blond Sheena of the Jungle swinging into the arms of her Great White Lover makes me sullen, even as Ling snorts: “If she actually rides that lion this thing gets an extra two points.” Noting my brooding fanatic countenance, she quiets down and pretends to watch the movie for a minute or two, then says, “I’ll bet you five bucks she gets tied to a stake by chanting tribesmen in the next thirty minutes.” When even that fails to get a response out of me she bursts out —the first time she has said anything to me directly about this —she explodes, “If it’s going to do this to you, why the fuck won’t you talk to her?”

  I look at her, startled, because this is the first time I have ever heard her use the word fuck. I want to tell her I can’t, because how can anyone live without hope? but instead I shrug. I lean forward into the TV screen and she lets it drop and never says anything about it again. I can’t tell her that I want it to happen all by itself, that I don’t want to say anything. In my fantasies I make millions and buy up Manhattan. In my fantasies I bomb the hell out of Cambodia and sleek women raise their black dresses for me spontaneously, in the backs of Washington limousines.

  Toward the end of the semester Mercy Fuller Cunningham throws a party, and this time I get invited. The invitation is embossed, and comes in a heavy cream-colored envelope which she leaves in my desk, on top of an article entitled Ego and Transference: A Post-post-modern Perspective. I spend the next two weeks planning, I study myself, I study the objective, and, so to speak, the ground. I consider my clothes and try to remember if I’ve ever heard Mercy saying anything about haberdashery. I try to think Tom Cruise. I watch her friends. I flip quickly between Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera: “Women Who Love Too Much” and “How to Get the Most out of Your Relationship.” I borrow money.

  So finally the day arrives, and I won’t put you through a description of my immediate preparations. I arrive exactly one hour and fifteen minutes late, which delay, by my calculations, conveys the exact intensity of cool I desire. And, I shouldn’t forget, I drive up in my mother’s Volvo, for which I have negotiated and wheedled and pretended impending nervous breakdown. But nobody’s outside on the patio, so nobody sees the car but that’s all right, I knock, and Mercy opens the door, simple white dress, off elegant shoulders that have the exact and right degree of definition and bone, the light behind glows through the dress and highlights the hair, some kind of natural but wet lipstick, all perfect and framed by the natural proscenium of the door.

  “Oh, Tom,” she says, “your hair looks great.”

  I suppose I should confess that I had, as the final touch on ensemble that night, smeared some soft gray goop into my locks, and had combed it back gently, as the tube advised, to get that slick but elegant wet look. This was the moment for decisive action, I had thought.

  “Thanks,” I say. “You’re, you’re dazzling tonight.” In the Volvo on the way up to the house I had practiced being worldly and poetic all at the same time. Think Cruise meets Byron, I’d said to myself, Donne genetically grafted onto a Don Johnson carcass.

  She takes me in and I sense heads turning, and she introduces me to some of her friends, and I nod at others I’ve met before. I can see Craig dancing in the next room. Everyone’s sort of golden in the gentle light from lamps, and they’re all standing around leaning on things, hands touching, arms curled comfortably around each other, drinking things from iced glasses. There’s no sign of Mercy’s parents. I talk to her for a few minutes and then the doorbell chimes again and she goes. I listen to the group she’s left me with for a few minutes and they’re talking about people I don’t know. So then I clear my throat and say, “I guess I’ll go get a drink.” They all turn to look at me.

  I get my drink, gin and tonic, and stand by the bar. The room stretches away from me and everywhere there’s people talking to each other. Craig brushes past me, “Hey, Dude!” I look at the print on the wall, some kind of birds in flight thing, and then I look at the next one. I finish my drink and go back to the bar for another one. I read the spines of the books on a shelf in the hall. Then I go up the stairs and wait in line for the bathroom. The two girls ahead of me are both in pink dresses, and are talking about going away in the summer. I try desperately to think of something to say but then the bathroom door opens and they go in together. After I finish I head down the stairs cradling my glass, and I hear Mercy’s voice from directly below me.

  “Oh, but he is sweet,” she says.

  I feel my face flush and I want to wind up and throw the glass across the room to shatter at the wall, but suddenly I’m down the stairs, through them all and past the bar and into the foyer and out of the door. I never see Mercy, and then I’m in the car heading home.

  In my room I realize I still have her glass. I put it down on my dresser and peer through the darkness at me in the mirror, at my hair and my new white jacket with zippers, pastel shirt, thin black belt, and I back away to get all of me in the mirror, trip over my two dumbbells on the floor and sit down with’ a jarring shock that races from my tailbone up into my head, and in that moment of real pain, as I look at the top of my head in the mirror, I understand exactly why I am trapped: it is my arrogance, my wiseass secondhand pitiful literary smarminess, my ambition that entangles me. So I get up and get her glass and walk into my bathroom and switch on the light. I open a new pack of Bics and shake them out onto the sink, so that they lie in untidy echelon on the porcelain. Then I take up a pair of scissors and start to clip off my hair. It comes off in tidy swathes and I lay them one by one in the glass. When I’ve finished cutting I squirt lather onto my scalp and set to work with the Bics. My skull comes up blue and bumpy and innocent. The razors scrape and resound through my head, and I cut
myself often. When I’ve finished I mop up the lather with a white towel and sprinkle after-shave into my hands. It stings my flesh intolerably and starts the tears from my eyes.

  So I take up the glass and go outside, onto the road. I start walking. It is dark, and I am looking for a body of water. This is a gesture I want, one which I do not understand completely myself, but by now I have accepted the necessity of gestures. I walk for a long time. Near morning I find a small pond in somebody’s yard. There are trees around me, and trucks are whistling by on a highway. I lean over a fence and underhanded toss the glass into the water, and even the small splash it makes scares a covey of ducks into the air. Then I start walking back.

  When I turn down the road to school, my thighs are aching and it is mid-morning. I walk in through the main gate, then into the halls. People turn and look at me, and by the time I reach the cafeteria a string of kids trails behind me. Inside, the buzz falters and dies down and then there is silence. Mercy, as usual, is sitting in the middle and to the back. She is eating a sandwich, it’s in her hand and there is a plate in front of her, her body is turned sideways and her back is straight, and there are people around her on the benches and at her feet are two of her acolytes, lacing up football boots. I walk up and slide onto the chair in front of her, and then say, in a very clear and proud voice, “I love you, Mercy Fuller Cunningham.” Then I lean over and put my head in her plate.