The Other's Gold

by Elizabeth Ames

  Her young brain was nothing but holes, she felt now, as she failed to remember the name of the girl who sat to her right on one side of a long table, Walker and his white-haired, matched-suit cronies on the other. The righteous rage she’d felt when preparing for this meeting was gone now, absent her roommates—Lainey’s fury, Alice’s steadiness, and even Margaret’s neediness—and sitting instead alongside Ruby, Cat, and the third girl whose name, should someone place a gun to her temple, she feared she still would not be able to produce, fallen as it had into the same cavernous space that had swallowed her courage, her resolve, any certainty that this was the right thing to do. Was the girl’s name a noun, too? A ruby, a cat, and a revolver? Was it a Vietnamese name? Maybe she didn’t have a name, maybe Ji Sun had imagined her, projected her, an extension of Ji Sun herself, the version who had suffered what Ji Sun was prepared to say she had.

  Ji Sun knew the feeling of reaching for a word and finding it only in the wrong language—Korean at a gas station in rural Connecticut, English at a dining table with her grandparents—but this was like that reach, only to grasp a handful of air, no language there at all. She searched and came up with only panic, fear at being found out. If she somehow failed to provide this girl’s name—it didn’t even occur to her that there’d be no reason for her to name the students who sat alongside her, that she wouldn’t end up being asked or even allowed to speak—her fellow complainant, her comrade, surely they would know Ji Sun was an imposter.

  At boarding school in year eleven, when everyone had been more preoccupied than usual with their grades, a pair of students had stolen a copy of a big biology test. It wasn’t even the final, but everything contributed to their class standing, and everyone was obsessed with being in the top twelve, the spots that were all but assured to gain entrance into the Ivies. Ji Sun did well in her classes without having to work quite as hard as some of her peers, but what consumed everyone around you came to consume you, too. She wasn’t immune.

  When their teacher had closed the door to the lab and told them they would not leave until the culprits revealed themselves, the look of reproach he gave the room, before picking up his book and sitting down to read, had been so powerful that she had started to feel not only guilty, but as though it were possible she had stolen the test. Could she have done so and not remembered? In her sleep? She’d never sleepwalked before, but stress made people do strange things, and as the instructor turned the pages of his book, licking his pointer finger each time, sighing and smacking his lips, she felt as though her hand might lift itself into the air without her permission. She put her right hand down on top of her left, then feared she’d blurt out that she was to blame. She interlocked her fingers, leaned her chin and closed lips into her hands. Mouth covered, hands clasped, she felt her body start to stand, offer herself up as the guilty one, just as a boy in the front of the classroom said “Fuck it!” and burst into tears before running out of the room. The teacher placed his bookmark calmly and followed the student into the hall. Ji Sun had nearly peed her pants in relief.

  Now again she felt doubt and panic whirl inside her, incrimination she wondered whether she could invert somehow to make her accusation sound. That Walker had sent those emails to her. That when he put his hand on her shoulder in the shadowy, high-ceilinged hall of his home in the woods he had then moved his hand lower, down to the small of her back, let it linger there, looked not at her eyes but instead at her breasts, then down at his own groin.

  Imagining this now sent no thrill of possibility up her center. In this room, Walker had lost his magnetism, though not his power over her. His skin was pale and dry, his hair seemed slick with grease. The clothes he wore were somehow both too shiny and too dusty, a sleek navy suit with a Silicon Valley sheen that seemed coated in the faintest fuzz of pollen or mold, like he’d walked through fog. His power now was that he knew the truth of her lie. But she knew the truth of his. So were they equals at this table? What kind of satisfying resolution could possibly be wrought when he sat alongside a whole slew of older men and one older woman, all in suits, all clearing their throats and crossing their legs and drinking coffee—comfortable—and beside Ji Sun there were only other young women: the law student; the two student Title IX advocates; and the three other accusers, all of whom were Asian, the fetishistic fuck.

  But the other three had something else in common that Ji Sun didn’t share, besides what Walker had done to them: they were all on financial aid. Ji Sun had known that Cat was, and Cat told her that Ruby and the other girl were, too, and Ji Sun might have guessed as much by the way the third girl, with her missing name, dressed: fake-leather shoes, a dress shirt and blazer that both looked polyester, the sale tag on the jacket having just been snapped off by one of the student advocates in the hall. There were long strands of her bleached-orange hair visible on the shoulders of her jacket, which Ji Sun could see was padded. She had the urge to collect these hairs, to return them to the girl, or to keep them in a locket that she would wear forever, as some act of apology for what Walker had done, for what Walker was, and for the part of Ji Sun that was the same as him. It was not lost on her that she and Walker were the richest in the room, and that she was richer. For a moment she felt strong again; they were both at the top of the food chain, but if he was a lion, she was a leopard, hidden in the shadowy trees until now, when she would tear his throat open with her teeth.

  But then he stood, and cleared his throat, and began to speak. His voice had the same melodic quality that it had whenever he lectured, which she saw he was going to do now. He announced that he had delivered his letter of resignation to the dean earlier that morning, and would like to read a brief statement.

  She thought she sensed contrition in his voice, but as he spoke, she realized he was sorry only for himself: sorry to say that he would be taking an early retirement from the university in order to focus on the increasingly urgent demands upon the time and talents of a man with his particular atypical skill set. With his facility in tech and deep knowledge of American history, he had a responsibility to ensure that the future of democracy in the United States was not in as grave jeopardy as it appeared to be, especially on the eve of the upcoming election, and while at war.

  So he was leaving to save the world? Did he even know why they were gathered in this room? It seemed he thought they were all his students, here for a special lecture, fans who would be disappointed to learn he was leaving, but proud that it was for reasons so lofty and unimpeachable.

  “I am sorry for the circumstances that muddy this departure, long in the making, and that the two brief, loving, and empowering relationships I had, many years ago, with fully consenting adult graduate students have become so misconstrued. I am sorry, too, for the misunderstandings and confusion that have led the students here to have reason to feel wronged by me, and to levy these unfounded accusations that I categorically and vehemently deny.” He didn’t turn to look at any of them, only continued his oration. “The trust between teacher and student, mentor and mentee, is sacrosanct. In my classroom, convention is challenged by design, but autonomy and safety are never threatened. I have endeavored to imbue my own admittedly challenging lectures with an encouragement to further question and challenge authority, and I can only speculate that the complaint by the assembled is a misguided response to that sincere entreaty.”

  This was his only gesture toward even acknowledging the four of them, the assembled, that their grievances were nothing more than misunderstandings, petty little nips at his heels, overblown now by being given audience in this room, though even here the assembled would not, it turned out, have any audience at all.

  When Walker finished speaking, the mediator thanked him for his statement, and for his service to the university, and everyone on his side of the table stood and shook hands and patted him on the back and acted as though attending an impromptu retirement announcement, too subdued for a party, but much too cheerful for a wake. />
  So Ji Sun wouldn’t have to say anything. None of them would get to say anything. She felt such powerful relief as she stood and filed out with the other girls, into the hallway together where they trembled, embraced, shuddered with the thrill of it: he was leaving, they had won. The time it took for relief to rearrange itself back into rage differed for each one of them. He hadn’t lost his job; he had stood and given a speech; he was probably right now receiving an engraved golden pen. Whether they wept now, or cheered, or shouted, or cursed his name, what did it matter; the door to the classroom was closed, and no one on the other side could hear.

  Chapter 20

  Since Walker didn’t finish out the semester, Lainey and Ji Sun had a reading tutorial in the space where the seminar had been. They could read the remaining texts on the syllabus, or they could supplement their assignments with the approval of one of the TAs.

  Lainey met with Seamus to talk about her plan for the final paper. She’d been working on an essay about Shulamith Firestone and the devaluation of women’s antiwar efforts, the pitting of feminists and antiwar activists against one another. But she wanted to change her topic, write something that indicted Walker more directly, while still meeting the requirements to pass the class. She wanted to write something that would set the campus ablaze, reach Walker all the way in California, take him by the neck, make him hurt. She wondered if Seamus had any ideas how to do that. He had none.

  “Figures,” Lainey said, “that you’d come up short.”

  Seamus didn’t say anything, just looked at her in his patient way, and then down at the table.

  “I’m disappointed, too, you know,” he said, his slow way of speaking so unlike Walker’s, who’d crammed so much into his lectures some days he sounded like an auctioneer. Seamus had grown out his beard since Walker’s departure, and with his woolly sweaters and thick Irish brogue, he seemed like a mossy teddy bear. Lainey was irritated by how comforting she found him, Walker’s working-class protégé, his cuddly, rough-hewn foil.

  “I don’t know if disappointed really covers it,” Lainey said.

  She wasn’t sure what she thought would happen after the mediation. That Walker would be held accountable. That he would apologize. That he would be fired, at least. That he’d flee in shame, fill his station wagon in the dead of the night, all the windows in that beautiful house on the hill gone dark. Instead, he’d gotten to ride off into the sunset of the West Coast, where he’d already been hired by some start-up in San Francisco and appeared in Time magazine’s Innovators issue. In the photograph, she could see he’d cast off his professor look as easily as he’d shrugged off the rumors. He wore a quarter-zip crew in some futuristic material, new rimless glasses, a bit of scruff, and most jarringly, a close-cropped haircut, waves sheared away. He smiled his same smile, though, deep dimples, all those bright teeth. But now Lainey saw a kind of cheerful cruelty there, like he was celebrating having gotten away with it, with everything. Did the rumors not follow him there? Did no one know, or no one care? Silly crushes, broken coed hearts. Girls with axes to grind. Lainey knew what people thought. She scowled at Seamus.

  “I know he, he had something with Amy once,” Seamus said, and cleared his throat.

  “What?” Lainey asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Dunno,” he said, and itched his beard. “I’d leave defining it to her, suppose.”

  “Well, okay,” Lainey said, “but was it consensual, at least?”

  Consensual was the one word that mattered, whatever happened between anyone, no matter what, was fine so long as no one shouted no, knocked anyone’s teeth out.

  “She’d say so, I hope,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Lainey asked.

  “He’s very . . . charismatic, right? Very convincing.” Seamus looked off into the middle distance. Lainey couldn’t tell if he felt sadness, or anger, or regret.

  “Not my story to say, though, Lainey. I’m sorry.” He looked at her.

  “Right, okay. I get that,” Lainey said. “I can respect that.” She looked at Seamus, waited for him to offer her something more, to explain why every conversation about Walker only left her angrier and more confused by how Walker managed to control the terms of the debate, even absent. How did he maintain his rule, still? She had not consented to this.

  “I’m so sorry, though,” Seamus said, and Lainey nodded, unsure what good it was.

  * * *

  • • •

  The war dragged on, and people were saying that Bush would win again in spite of or even because of it. Lainey could feel her fury cool, begin to fossilize into depression. For a short while after meeting with Seamus, she tried to get in touch with Amy to talk to her about Walker, but Amy dodged her overtures. She tried to think of something she and her roommates could do to Walker, but all her ideas felt so juvenile, and none were practical with him thousands of miles away.

  “What, do you want to egg his car?” Alice asked.

  “I wouldn’t mind, if it were here. I would take some satisfaction in knowing that at least he knew we were still angry. That we weren’t . . . done.”

  “I think we should leave it alone,” Ji Sun said. She felt anger, but also relief that she hadn’t been found out. “I don’t think it would make a difference,” she added.

  “Well, it wouldn’t have to be eggs. I want to do something, something worse.”

  “No, I don’t think it matters at all. He doesn’t care if we show him we’re furious, or that we know, or that we hate him. I don’t think he’s giving us a second thought,” Ji Sun said. She looked at Lainey, but also somewhere else, inward.

  Why should it still hurt, to think of the indifference of someone you hated now? But it did, and it burned. It burned and burned.

  Chapter 21

  Just before summer break, Lainey broke up with Adam. She was headed to Paris to study abroad, and couldn’t imagine anything more absurd than having a long-distance boyfriend while in Paris. It wouldn’t be fair to either of them, she told Adam, practical, romantic Adam, who nodded and told her that he would wait for her.

  “But I don’t want you to wait for me,” Lainey said, knowing already, someplace she couldn’t name, that she would return to him. “I want you to sleep with a whole bunch of women. With men, too! Sow your wild oats.”

  “I’ve sown plenty,” Adam said, and brushed the crumbs of a bagel from his pant leg. She wanted to jump his bones whenever he did something fussy like this. She couldn’t understand it; he drove her up the wall.

  “Well, I haven’t,” she said, though she was preemptively weary of her own insistence on this shopworn idea of a love affair in France, to be wine-soaked and puffing a Gauloise, sodden with tears, jilted and lusty along the banks of the Seine, a path she knew from books and movies to be the ideal place for a certain kind of soaring heartbreak that she both feared and sought.

  She packed her best attempt at effortless French-girl clothes, though she could tell before she’d even left Charles de Gaulle that she’d gotten it wrong. As usual, not trying too hard involved great sums of money, as well as genetic gifts that allowed for neat little buns, bitten-bottom-lip pouts, perfect freckles that looked drawn on.

  Lainey hadn’t expected the depths of destabilization she felt in Paris, perhaps more potent after having enjoyed Adam’s steadying effects. Now, in a new place, away from her roommates, she teetered into a kind of mania not to love Paris, and Parisians, as she’d planned, but to turn her small room into a garret, papered with passages from essays about French revolutionaries and postcards of cafés and cathedrals, a collage of the experience she’d imagined she might have; its effect was oppressive rather than inspiring. She hadn’t written so much as a postcard herself, beyond the bare minimum to pass her French course. She skulked around Shakespeare & Company, crept into the nooks inhabited by the booksellers who boarded there, succeeded more than once in nicking
their personal items—a hairbrush, an address book, a small tube of lotion—only to feel washed with guilt and return what she’d stolen a few days later. The ability to both steal and restore made her feel invisible, as she couldn’t see any other explanation for how she managed to escape notice: American, nonwhite, young and lovely, even as unkempt as she had become, her brown-black roots grown out and the bottom half of her hair a deep, inky blue that she’d imagined would look chic with her Breton shirts, but instead made her feel as if she’d crawled out of a grille d’égout. Maybe she was a ghost now, haunted by her own evacuated optimism, by the war, by Walker. She’d let her love for Adam distract her, and now she was sinking down into the despair she should have felt all along.

  * * *

  • • •

  Ji Sun and Adam both stayed on campus for the summer. Adam had a summer journalism intensive, and Ji Sun arranged to intern with the head curator at the college art museum. She’d pictured herself in the basement archive, away from people, humidity, and sunshine, alone with the art and her two gloved hands. Instead, she was put to work as “collaboration coordinator” for the digital archive, a project with which everyone at the museum was obsessed. It was as though the idea of looking at art in person were already obsolete, and all that mattered was getting everything they owned online, and fast, to win some kind of race against every other museum in the world, to “join the global conversation,” as the museum’s British-born director put it, sometimes with a pointed glance toward Ji Sun, as though together they could speak on behalf of all the world, its citizenry crying out for the pixelated versions of the museum’s modest, incoherent collection. With Alice away, head counselor now at the wilderness medicine camp she attended every summer, and Margaret back in Missouri, babysitting and working at the ice cream shop again, Ji Sun spent most of her evenings missing Lainey with Adam.