Graduates in Wonderland

by Jessica Pan

  I can’t imagine going out to a bar ever again. Flirting with someone else. No. I don’t even want to get over him. Unless he gets over me, and then I want to get over him immediately.

  It usually goes like this: They leave and I’m left, but then eventually I move on. The leaving always hurts, but the person actually being gone, I could accept. I always knew I’d meet someone new. But this one—­this one feels different.

  But why didn’t he ask me to meet him in Australia? Why didn’t he ask me to meet him in Southeast Asia? Why didn’t he ask me to be his girlfriend? Why did he let me go? I guess I wasn’t enough to love. I feel lonelier than I ever have in my entire life. I’m in Beijing, China. Astrid’s gone. Victoria’s gone. He’s gone. You’re so far away. My family is so far away.

  It’s so clear to me now how we are all alone. We die alone.

  Oh no. The sad album is on repeat. nononononono

  Write me anything but please write me as soon as you can.

  Love,

  Jess

  MAY 16

  Rachel to Jess

  Jessica. You’re enough to love. I can’t formulate that in a way that makes it sound not crazy, but you are. I think Sam was probably preoccupied with his next adventure. Or just being typically British: reticent and not forthcoming. Haven’t you read any Jane Austen? British men lock their feelings inside.

  I felt that lonely when you left New York. It wasn’t so bad when other people left, because you were still there. But when the last close person leaves—­that is when the breakdown happens. I don’t know what else to say because I didn’t handle it so well (Xanax, Claudia, bad sex with Saul). I think you just have to make yourself get through it. You’re going to have to leave the house and act interested in meeting people when all you want to do is stay in bed. That’s the only answer. But it’s going to be okay.

  And remember that this feeling is temporary—­no matter what happens.

  I’m sorry. I wish I could distract you with stories about Paris, but not much is happening here. I feel on the verge of so many things. I feel like I’m so close to dating Olivier, figuring out my thesis, and reworking my book’s final draft.

  I’ve still been corresponding with Lee, who continues to say profound and encouraging things about my book’s plot development. It’s about a girl in London who has memory problems, but I can’t figure out how to end it. Do I make her murder somebody and she doesn’t know if it’s real or not? Everything I’ve learned about plot just makes me more hesitant and confused, because I can’t seem to fully understand my protagonist’s desire. Lee thinks this comes with life experience and time.

  In the meantime, I got Jacques and Marc to proofread the early parts of my thesis, which I’ve been laboring over for weeks. The thesis is almost like a story: tracing four films that show characters confronting themselves as children, in literal and metaphorical ways. Fellini, in 81/2, watching his younger self as though he were in a film he is directing. Bob Dylan, in I’m Not There, turning away from his younger self, denying that he was ever someone else.

  There’s something in this subject I find so moving. How do we deal with all the people we’ve been? What happens when we have to confront them? It’s a poetic topic, but it becomes very prosaic when I write it in my French. And bad prose at that. Apparently, I am incapable of distinguishing street slang from antiquated expressions, and use both indiscriminately. Sometimes Jacques laughs out loud, circles a sentence, and hands my paper to Marc to enjoy. “Rachel, if you translate this into English, it literally means, ‘She is a woman of ill repute who spends a lot of time with her gang.’”

  However, I did not point out that last night Marc called a steep hill in English “so much, too much, too high. So much, too far.”

  In return for their editing my French essays, I’m correcting their applications for US exchange programs. They both want to go to Yale this fall. What, Brown isn’t good enough for you? More than that, you want to trade in Paris for New Haven? Who are you people? They’re both enchanted with being near New York, though. They find Paris “boring.” However, boring is the same word as annoying in French (which actually explains a lot about how French people think). We’re basically switching dreams, though I don’t want them to leave. They’re becoming such an integral part of my Paris dream, and not just because I’m still holding out for Olivier either.

  Anyway, I know this talk of people leaving isn’t helping. Just remember that no matter how dark everything seems now, you will get through this.

  Have you heard from him since you last wrote?

  Love,

  Thinking of You

  (Rach)

  MAY 26

  Rachel to Jess

  I’m waiting for my e-mail!!! Tried calling you but your phone is off!

  Where are you?

  MAY 26

  Five minutes later

  Rachel to Jess

  How do we feel about nude stockings for going out? It’s not quite warm yet, but somehow I feel very Queen Mother when I put them on. Also, did you see the photos of Rosabelle and Buster in Argentina??? He grew a mustache and a potbelly!!! It does not look good.

  And why you no write back?

  Jessica, where ARE you????

  Love,

  Rachel

  JUNE 1

  Jess to Rachel

  Um...Malaysia?

  Malaysia!

  I’m here in Malaysia with...SAM SINGER!!! Who is right now wearing flip-­flops and my baseball cap and trolling the beach to find us banana smoothies!

  I’m with Sam! We’re about three thousand miles south of Beijing, on a tropical island that can only be reached by boat, right in the middle of the South China Sea.

  After a week of coming home and wallowing in my apartment with Ryan Adams, I received a text message—­it was Sam in Hong Kong asking me, “Has it been long enough for me to tell you that I miss you yet?”

  I stared at the message for a long time.

  How do I know if I’ll ever feel this way again? I had to tell him because I had nothing to lose—­I had already lost him.

  I wrote him a very honest e-mail telling him that I was crazy about him, that I missed him, that my e-mail was by all means a love letter, that I thought about him all the time, and that when I looked at my life in Beijing without him, I found it severely lacking.

  The next morning I awoke to an e-mail from him, in which he confessed, “I miss you so much. Your playlist has had countless run-­throughs. I’m soppy and I know it. But I don’t care. If my plans weren’t so firmly set, and my flights bought and paid for, I would have stayed in Beijing instead of flying out to SE Asia. Australia just doesn’t seem as appealing a prospect anymore, but I already have my ticket to Sydney. But I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  Of course, the first thing I did was find cheap flights to Malaysia, his next destination. It’s not peak season, and tickets cost about as much as five banana smoothies.

  I wrote about my flight search to Sam, and he immediately replied: “Come as soon as you can!”

  I wanted to write you earlier but I felt too low and then too frantic. I called Isla to see if she could close the magazine issue for me, because I needed to go to Malaysia (although I was vague and did not mention Sam at all), and she assured me that she could, although she was puzzled. Then I scrambled around frantically trying to finish two articles and buy a swimsuit.

  Three days ago, I took a train to Tianjin, a city outside Beijing, where I spent the night and then woke up before dawn the next day to catch a six-­hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. Then I spent five hours in the airport eating laksa and trying out all the lotions in The Body Shop before boarding another hour-­long flight to the eastern coast. As soon as my final plane landed, I ran out of the airport and got into a cab. The air was balmy, the stars were out, and I immediately started sweating in the tropical
heat.

  When I stepped out of the cab, I sprinted to the door of the hostel, where Sam Singer, tan from his adventures and with a newly shaved crew cut, appeared. I jumped straight into his very tan arms.

  Then we immediately got naked.

  The next morning we took a boat together to the island from where I am now writing to you. Crystal-­clear blue waters and hot white sand. It’s sunny and hot all day, and then when we are lying together in our wooden bungalow, it pours and thunders all night. The only other people I’ve spotted are couples on their honeymoons. And while walking along the beach with Sam, I also have the eerie feeling that we are on our honeymoon. We are doing everything out of order.

  We spend twenty-­four hours a day together, which I’d never done with a guy before. In the hut where we are staying, our bathroom doesn’t even have a door—­just a flimsy curtain! Now it feels like we’re married. There’s no TV in our room. There are no distractions but the sun and the ocean, and in our abundant free time, we have sex three times a day.

  It is literally the desert island test, and by default my five objects I can’t live without are Sam, banana shakes, sunscreen, goggles, and this Internet café that has at least four resident cats. There is a white kitten sleeping on my foot as I write this, and right now my biggest problem is figuring out how to stand up without disturbing him.

  Despite all the sex, right now I feel supremely unsexy. My face is bright red with sunburn. This morning, at breakfast, my skin was peeling off. I kept trying to shield my face from Sam, apologizing for how disgusting I was, even to myself. I was in the middle of saying something about how I was a molting snake, when finally Sam reached over and said, “Stop. Nothing you do can disgust me.”

  This contradicts everything I have ever read in a magazine, ever. It is also the most romantic thing I’ve ever been told.

  It almost scares me to like him so much. We talk and talk about our families or how strange a place Beijing is or we make wild speculations about all of the people we’ve met during the day and he runs his hands through my hair until eventually we fall asleep. I can’t think of when I’ve ever been happier in my entire life.

  We nearly miss dinner every night because after being at the beach or snorkeling all day—­we come back as the sun sets, shower, sleep together, and eventually end up sprinting to the only restaurant on the island as it closes. Last night we were informed that the kitchen had already closed, and we begged the woman to at least let us have milk shakes for dinner. Sam and I both chose Mars bar milk shakes. This felt like some sort of confirmation: We’ll never live in a household without chocolate.

  We leave in two days. I’m beginning to feel melancholy after all the giddiness of traveling to a new place and being reunited, but I feel so much more assured about his feelings for me and mine for him. If I’d shown up here, and he’d been inconsiderate and boring, at least I would have known what I wasn’t missing.

  I know that this is still an interlude from real life. I don’t know what I’m doing, but whatever this is, it feels right to me.

  Maybe in your book, Girl meets Boy, Girl goes to Malaysia with Boy, Girl loses Boy. Now give me a great ending.

  Love,

  Jess

  P.S. I haven’t met a single sassy monkey. Don’t know what George was talking about. So disappointed.

  JUNE 2

  Rachel to Jess

  Okay. Um. Malaysia. Yes.

  WHAT? I don’t even know how to respond to that. WHAT? Malaysia? With no notice? You would be in Malaysia! How did you take total sorrow and devastation and turn it into utter bliss within a matter of days? And also, how can I write you an ending when I didn’t write this story—­I also want to know what happens next!

  Everything sounds so far away it’s almost hard to imagine. I am currently facing exams. They are three to four hours long, and professors provide the students with one question and a stack of Blue Books. Sometimes, if the students are lucky, we get a choice of three questions.

  In my hardest class, the question was something the professor repeated during every class: “According to cinema theories, what are the XXXXXs in film?” I only knew one translation of the XXXXX: “1920s hat.” So was he really asking, “What are the 1920s hats in films?”

  I did not know the answer to this for months.

  Finally, finally, I asked Jacques about it. XXXXX also means “existing problems.” Oh.

  So for the exam, I sat down and filled out four Blue Books full of all of the theories about what’s wrong with cinema: the way we regard it, the way we react as spectators, the way it plays with the female gaze. I knew exactly what to write but was unsure of exactly how to put it in academic French. I ended up with what is very likely an ungrammatical, choppy French essay about hats.

  Four hours later, one hundred of my fellow classmates and I emerged from the lecture hall, scrambling for the door with our collective severe nicotine withdrawal. I have been initiated.

  After all our suffering together, I truly feel like a French student now.

  I’m really hoping I pass. I did manage to string together pages and pages about why cinema sucks. But, if I fail, I lose my visa unless I repeat the academic year (which I don’t have enough money to do). I can’t imagine having to leave Paris after already laying down the foundation for a life here.

  Olivier, meanwhile, invited me over for dinner the other night. I’m sorry, what I meant was, OLIVIER INVITED ME OVER FOR DINNER THE OTHER NIGHT! Here’s the short version:

  I’m in so deep I can’t see the sky.

  Anyway, I had shaved my legs. Although every girl knows this is the surest way to going home alone, I still did it. I arrived at his apartment after carefully picking out a bottle of red wine. Actually, I glanced at the rows of bottles and chose one based on the fact that the bottle was blue and beautiful, and had a picture of the ocean on it.

  Olivier opened the door. Cheek kiss, cheek kiss. I handed him my wine and then offered to help with the salad, but Olivier wouldn’t let me make anything. I stood at the sink, pretending to help wash vegetables, and when he tried to reach the dishes around me, he would place both his hands on my waist to move me over an inch or two. I hovered at the sink as often as possible.

  It’s been way too long since I had sex.

  Everything he said, I found sexy. Parmesan cheese? Don’t mind if I do. Olive oil on that salad? Oooh, yes, please.

  We sat down and we talked about his brother’s new baby and my nephews. This conversation made me think that he was sensitive beneath his casual exterior.

  And then the doorbell rang. It was Sasha and Marc, who had decided that since they were in the neighborhood, they would drop by. I immediately felt disappointed. I was immensely gratified to see the strained welcome on Olivier’s face.

  Marc began to tease Olivier for the “shit” wine he had served, and I turned bright red. What, I’m not a French person! This knowledge is not inborn in me! I know nothing of your wine and your ways! Whatever. It tasted fine to me. Who cares that I can’t pick out wine! So what if I can’t understand French idioms!? So I can’t write in perfect French!

  Olivier threw some more pasta in the pot and we crowded around his little table. His knees kept touching mine. We stayed there, talking and drinking shit wine until about 3 A.M., when Sasha and Marc walked me home.

  It was such a fun evening, but I couldn’t help thinking that it could have been romantic. And now I’m still waiting on Olivier to make a move. I came home and wrote for a few hours in French, but immediately deleted the story. It was all about a girl who falls in love with a winemaker. But I didn’t know any of the right words. For example, is winemaker the correct term? Even in English?

  Oh, and I miss you. True story. Come back from Malaysia.

  Love,

  Rach

  JUNE 4

  Jess to Rachel

  I
like this new attitude of yours. So what if you think the problem with cinema is hats? Very innovative! So what if you write French like an eight-­year-­old? Who cares? So what if I ran away to Malaysia on a whim and told no one but you? Doesn’t matter!

  I just landed in Beijing a few hours ago. Malaysia already feels so far away. The only evidence of ever having been is how tanned my skin is and the forty e-mails from Isla in my inbox.

  Very early this morning, I left Sam. It was rushed, but last night was when we really said our good-­byes.

  Although we didn’t directly address anything, we grew more serious last night. He asked me about how much longer I wanted to stay in Beijing. I told him that I loved Beijing, but that I didn’t know what more I could get out of living there and that I wanted to pursue serious journalism. I mentioned that I wanted to go to journalism school, but I didn’t know where. The question just sat there, unanswered. I stood up to finish packing my bag. He stood up and said, “I think there are journalism schools in Australia,” before he stepped into the bathroom, turned on the water, and got into the shower. WHAT KIND OF EXIT IS THAT?? I wanted to knock on the door and ask, “I’m sorry, what? What was that part about me being in Australia again? Just one more time, please.”

  We didn’t discuss it again, although it was all I thought about for the rest of the night.

  This morning, we took a boat back to the mainland and I kissed him good-­bye while rows of taxi drivers looked on. I tried to linger, but I was sharing a cab with a Chinese couple who were also heading to the airport. I got into the car while Sam boarded a bus to Penang.

  In the cab, the couple began speaking to me in Mandarin. The girl, who had witnessed our good-­bye, asked about my “boyfriend.” I tried to reply in Mandarin although my brain was emotionally fried.

  “Oh, him? He’s moving to Australia.”

  “So when are you moving to Australia?”

  Pause.

  “Oh...I’m not moving to Australia. I will live in Beijing and he will live in Australia. We will not be together.”