by Hari Kunzru
She got up and slid the door open on to the balcony. Sophie followed, and they looked over the river, at the costume-drama ripple and glint of Chelsea reflected in the water.
‘It’s a good view,’ Sophie snorted. ‘But is that enough? I mean, what else is Mr Swift bringing to the table?’
So Gabriella sat in Sake-Souk listening to Guy chewing his main course and thinking about what he was bringing to the table and eventually found herself staring back at the man on the other side of the room. He looked familiar, an actor maybe.
Guy followed her eyeline. ‘Do you know him?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘I don’t think so.’
Guy took a moment to revel in her voice, the way her beautiful mouth turned th into f, her bored elongated i. He heard in it the generic European female tone of techno records, a voice made to say, ‘Oh baby, you make me feel so good.’ The untapped erotics of Gaby’s accent diverted him from the problem of the man at the far end of the restaurant, and he forgot the icy look he was about to flash him and instead made an attempt to bridge the gap which had opened up during dinner.
‘Sweetie, I thought maybe we could try out Thailand this summer.’
‘Try it out? Why? Do you want to buy it?’
She was looking at him with an expression of unfathomable scorn. He began to think he had said something wrong. Gaby was a great girl but she did have her moods.
When Chris’s alarm went in the morning, she stumbled out of the bedroom to find the couch vacant and the spare quilt neatly folded up on top. A note was propped up on the coffee table thanking her without punctuation or capital letters for a nice evening, and as Nicolai groaned and called out plaintively for coffee a momentary stab of unease penetrated her nausea. Did she do something last night? Later, from her desk at Virugenix, she sent Arjun mail. He did not reply. That week she was swamped by work, and the silence lengthened into several days, a weekend. The following Monday she spotted him in the cafeteria and went over to say hi. He said hi back and carried on eating. She asked if he still wanted to go on with the lessons. She meant it as a joke. He nodded hesitantly but wouldn’t make eye contact, shuffling his feet under the Formica table as if he couldn’t wait for her to go away.
‘Arjun, did I piss you off the other day?’
‘Pardon? Oh, no, not at all.’
‘So why are you acting like this?’
‘Like what?’
‘You know what I mean.’
He grimaced and shrugged his shoulders petulantly. ‘I’m not pissed off; I’m very happy. Yes, let’s have a driving lesson. Email me, OK?’
‘Come on, don’t be an asshole. Was it Nicolai?’
‘Who?’
‘I told you I lived with someone.’
‘No, you didn’t.’ There was a long uneasy pause, as he struggled for words. ‘Well you did, but I thought you just meant – that is – you didn’t tell me you were married.’
‘Not married, Arjun, just living together. And we – well, it’s not like we’re exactly traditional – look, why am I even explaining this? All I’m saying is I’m sorry, OK, for whatever it is. I want us to be friends.’
‘So do I,’ he said.
This was Chris’s cue to say great absolutely see you some time and walk off. When they start to get weird on you, it’s a prelude to one thing only. Mr Arjun Mehta was turning into trouble. He would have to go somewhere else for driver ed. For some reason what came out of her mouth was ‘Good, so why don’t we act like friends and hang out for an evening? We could do something – I don’t know – we could catch one of your movies.’
Arjun looked confused. ‘My movies? You mean Indian movies? You want to see a Hindi movie?’
‘Sure.’
He looked surprised.
‘Great,’ he said uncertainly ‘I’m not sure you’ll like it.’
‘Why not let me try? How about tomorrow night?’
‘Uh, OK.’
Which is how they ended up driving to a mall in Kirkland to see a movie that involved two boys and two girls who took three and a half hours to persuade their parents to let them marry each other in the correct combination. Chris was bored. Was the guy in the see-through organdie shirt really supposed to be cool? He had a mullet, for chrissakes. And how precisely did they make it to the pyramids? Since it was shown without subtitles, Arjun had to whisper the important plot points to her, and while he sat entranced, she drifted in and out of the story, following trains of thought about the reality or otherwise of the older guy’s beard, the stones in the mother’s necklace, the vaguely Dynasty salmon-pink palace where much of the action took place. Finally the nuptials were completed, and the audience spilled out into the muted evening lighting-scheme of the mall. Chris looked around at the young Asian couples and single-sex clusters of teenagers and saw that everyone was animated, smiling. Arjun had the same look. Satisfied. Emotionally replete.
‘That,’ he said, humming one of the tunes from the film, ‘was just too too good.’
Chris spotted three other white faces, a man and two women, each half of a couple, each looking as mystified as she felt. Quickly she devoted her attention to rustling up some kind of critical response; Arjun was going to ask her what she thought, and she was going to have to come up with something better than the real-beard-real-rocks-real-palace conundrum or he would be offended. This was supposed to be about the two of them making up, after all.
She was prevented from giving an opinion by one of those sudden and unexpected encounters that can be given a positive spin only by reminding yourself that it would have been worse if you were with your mother. What Tori and the girl-bar crew were doing staggering around at midnight in the Totem Lake Mall was anyone’s guess. The first Chris knew about it was when her hair was jerked back and a pierced tongue was rammed down her throat as the centrepiece of a very wet French kiss.
‘Hey there, you little piece of chicken,’ growled Tori, releasing Chris’s face and playfully pinching her nipple. ‘How you doing?’ Six-one in her socks and worked-out some way beyond the call of duty, Tori (the joke went) was born too late. Had she been on the scene before 1989, she could have found work as a monument in an Eastern bloc town square. Ordinarily she was a handful, but tonight, whacked up on this week’s c.n.s. stimulant of choice, sweating profusely and surrounded by her adoring biker-jacketed fan club, her name would head any list Chris could compile of people not to introduce to shy heterosexual men from countries with conservative moral codes.
‘Who’s your buddy?’ asked Tori, eyeing Arjun like a particularly dubious fast-food menu item.
‘Christ, Tori,’ seethed Chris. All around them, the South Asian film fans of Kirkland were reacting to their first lesbian kiss. Tutting parents scooped up their children. Gap-clad teens experienced a sudden broadening of their horizons. Arjun looked as if someone had rewired him, badly. Chris was pissed off. Tori’s friends were making eyes at her and sniggering at Arjun. Luckily the crew were on their way to a party, and once Chris had made it clear she wouldn’t be tagging along, they headed off in a tramp of engineer boots and ripped cotton. She watched them, relieved that nothing involving more nudity had taken place.
Next she had to deal with Arjun, whose system appeared to have hung.
‘You. Bar. Now. We need to talk.’
And so Arjun was led to a Mexican-theme place with a plastic bandito figure outside it where the staff served them even though they were stacking chairs and wiping the tables and there he was made to down two shots of tequila and given a crash course in contemporary American sexual mores. Chris, it seemed, lived and slept with Nicolai, and, though they were not married, this arrangement had been their default setting for the last two years. Though Nicolai could correctly be called Chris’s boyfriend, the two of them (here was where it got complicated) also slept with other people, on a basis described as open but limited, the limit being defined by the degree of emotional involvement with the outside partner. As Chris explained all this, Arjun ex
perienced a turbulent flow of emotions including (but not limited to) disappointment, jealousy, hope, intrigue, sexual arousal and guilt. Blushing furiously, he tried to bury them all. He put it to Chris (perceptively, he thought) that her limit-definition was unsound, and a less vague system for running her relationship would be to use measurable criteria like time spent away from the partner or the performance of particular sex acts. Chris told him to concentrate on what she was saying. Arjun started to argue that this was precisely what he had been doing, but something in her expression stopped him. He had a question.
‘Where is he from?’
‘What?’
‘Your boyfriend. Which country is he from?’
‘Nic’s Bulgarian-American. Is that relevant?’
‘Ah, it was Bulgarian.’
He stared intently at his empty shot glass; even in America it was probably indecent to meet someone’s eyes while remembering what they sound like having sex. He was so busy trying to route around this problem that he missed what she said next.
‘I beg your pardon?’
No, he had heard right. Some of the people Chris slept with were women, and the tall one with the shaved head was one of them. Chris accepted that because of his culture Arjun might be shocked by this but she hoped he would try to be open-minded. He ought to recognize that it was not as if she owed him this explanation, or anything at all. She just wanted things to be clear.
Arjun was in fact familiar with lesbianism, which was a favourite theme of the CD-ROMs Aamir sold at Gabbar Singh’s Internet Shack. Admittedly the physical appearance of these particular lesbians had thrown him, since all the ones in Aamir’s pictures had big hair and lacy underwear. But that was only one of a number of problematic areas in Chris’s speech. It was difficult to know where to begin. In confusing semantic situations, he had often found it helpful to define terms before proceeding.
‘Is there a word for someone like you?’
‘Hello? Think before you speak there, buddy.’
‘You are a bisexual, yes?’
‘You make it sound like a medical condition.’
‘Oh, so you think it has a physiological basis?’
For some reason the question seemed to make Chris angry, and she stormed out of the bar. Arjun was careful to leave a tip for the barman before he followed her. Four drinks. One two three four singles, tucked under a glass. He tried to take this mood-swing in his stride. Christine Schnorr was an alien creature (what Indian girl would have such tattoos?), and her unusual operating rules were part of her difference. Some things about her personality were clearly national traits: her hostility to her family, for example. Others, like her anger and this new set of sexual revelations, had some mysterious alternative source.
Apart from Priti and a couple of cousins (aunties didn’t count) Arjun had never spent much time with women. He certainly had no idea how to handle an angry one. When he caught up with Chris at the car, she was pacing up and down, twirling her keys threateningly round one finger. Spotting him, she launched into a tirade which echoed through the underground lot.
‘I don’t fucking believe this, I really don’t. What in hell gives you the right to talk to me that way? I don’t have to answer to you for anything. Not a damn thing, you understand? Yeah I fucked Tori. So what? I mean, is this Nazi Germany or something? Who are you to call someone sick? What gives you the right to judge people? You know what? Fuck you, Arjun. Fuck! You!’
She pulled open the car door and got in. The engine started with a roar. Arjun’s composure began to fall to pieces. His wrong doing was obviously more serious than he thought. Why would she be like this? What were you supposed to do? Maybe there was a physical technique, a fireman’s lift, an angry woman Heimlich Manoeuvre. Chris started to pull out of the parking bay. Desperate to stop her, he ran round to the front of the Honda. As she jerked the car forwards, he ended up sprawled over the hood.
‘Why are you so angry?’ he mouthed through the windshield. Chris wound down a window.
‘Get the fuck off my car!’
‘I’m sorry’ he implored. ‘Why are you angry with me?’
‘Fuck off!’
‘But tell me why?’
‘Because – because I hate bigoted assholes like you. Just because your religion or whatever says women are your slaves doesn’t mean I have to play along. Now will you get off my fucking car or am I going to have to run you down?’
Now Arjun was scared. Never before had he faced the serious threat of violence.
‘You mustn’t do this!’ he shouted. ‘I’m not a religious person. I’m a rationalist! Please, Chris!’
Chris leaned her head against the steering wheel. How did she get into this? Splayed across the hood, Arjun looked like a tall, skinny marsupial. A lemur perhaps. Or a sloth. A mall security guard was jogging towards them, speaking into a walkie-talkie. She waved him away.
‘It’s fine, OK. Don’t sweat it.’
Uncertainly, the guard slowed down. She waved again and smiled a sweet good-citizen smile. Then she stuck her head back out of the window
‘Get in.’
Arjun gingerly released his grip on the windshield wipers and slid into the passenger seat. Chris pulled the rest of the way out of the spot and headed for the exit. Arjun decided to trust her. It seemed unlikely she would do anything rash now.
Since the night they got too drunk, Arjun’s feelings about Chris had undergone a transition. The sounds that seeped through the partition wall had flayed away a skin of romantic possibility. He understood now that there could never have been true love between them, not as he had pictured it: Radha and Krishna, Devdas and Parvati, Raj and Bobby. Only after the illusion was crushed did he admit to himself he had considered it at all. What would his parents have said? It would have been impossible.
They were on the freeway before he felt it was safe to try to clear things up. ‘I’m sorry,’ he began, truthfully. ‘I’ve offended you. I don’t think you’re sick and I have no professional legal experience and I know this is the land of the free and you have full citizenship rights to do whatever you want at any time.’
Chris allowed herself to be slightly mollified. ‘That’s a start.’
‘All I wanted to know is – well, this is all rather new to me. I expect you are taught about it in sexual-education classes. You have to remember I haven’t had your experiences.’
Chris narrowed her eyes. ‘What do you mean, experiences?’
‘Sexual experiences. Of course – I understand the procedure. I’m not entirely ignorant, you know.’
‘You understand the procedure?’
‘For sex. I’ve read a lot of things about it. It’s important to educate yourself. I’ve seen pictures too, of course…’
‘You’ve read a lot.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you’ve done it too.’
The silence stretched out between them, broken only by the rumble of passing cars. Arjun looked at his hands.
‘Well, not as such.’
‘You mean with another guy. Homosexuality.’
‘With anyone.’
‘You’ve never had sex at all?’ She picked her words carefully. ‘Arjun, are you telling me you’re a virgin?’
‘There’s no need to be crude about it.’
‘I’m sorry. But you’re how old? Twenty-three?’
He nodded. Chris considered the matter.
‘This is a line, right? You think if you say you’re a virgin I’m going to feel sorry for you and fuck you.’
Arjun went very quiet. When he spoke again his voice was small and tight. ‘Maybe you should just stop the car. I don’t like to sit here and be insulted.’
‘My God, you’re telling the truth.’
‘Why would I lie?’
‘Why would you lie?’
She decided not to get into that one and carried on driving down the road, thinking to herself, a virgin? Oh, brother.
Chris would want it known that her decision
to have sex with Arjun should be put down solely and entirely to drugs. Were there a national system of learning from mistakes, the story would be written up and distributed to schoolchildren as a government information leaflet, a true-life illustration of why drugs are bad and the people who take them are stupid.
A few weeks later, on one of Nic’s guy Saturday nights, when their apartment was invaded by men with beer and snack-foods and a primal urge to swap Mariners stats, she found herself at the Iron Bar, a vaguely fetishy mixed-gay place in the city, filling in Tori’s crowd about that evening at the mall and the world of Arjun Mehta more generally. Arjun, she explained, was actually a sweet guy. He wasn’t really misogynist or homophobic, just naive. Get him on the subject of computers and you almost forgot what a freak he was.
Maybe it was cruel to bring up the virgin thing, maybe it made her a bad person, but it was Saturday night and she did it and it got a laugh. I’m telling you he’s as fresh as the day he stepped off the plane. You’re kidding. How old? Carlos (predictably) said oh give me his phone number. Tori (ditto) started talking about strap-ons. In the air hung the consensus idea that it would be somehow entertaining to do something about Arjun. The topic cycled back intermittently through the evening. Scenarios were imagined, positions devised. For a while an extended riff on the word deflower took hold of the table. Somewhere later down the line Chris did half an Ε and a line of speed and some time after that, when she had done a couple more lines and was bored with the music at the club but not yet ready to face drunken horny badbreath post-guynight Nic, it started to feel like a good idea to actually go through with it, to take another half a pill and go round to Arjun’s place and fuck him.
