Authors: Andrew Porter
“But don’t you care?” she asked.
“It’s not about caring,” he said, and then he’d looked away, and that had been the last time they talked about his parents for quite a while.
Still, despite the difficulty of his teenage years, Raja seemed to have enjoyed his time at Stratham so far. He had a lot of friends here, more friends than Chloe had ever had, and these friends often came over to his dorm room in the evenings after class. They seemed to gravitate toward him in the same way that other students gravitated toward professors. They valued his opinion, respected his advice, and often turned to him for counsel on the various problems in their lives. Chloe liked to joke that these friends of his were not really friends so much as “patients” and that he should be billing them at a competitive rate. “Maybe we could get a
couch in here,” she’d said one night. “You know, set up a receptionist’s desk in the hall. I could be your secretary.”
“Right.” Raja had laughed. Then he’d looked at her strangely and frowned. “To be honest, you know, I have no idea why they even come here. I mean, honestly, I don’t know why they think
I
can help them. It really should be the other way around.”
But the truth was there was a part of Chloe that secretly enjoyed the fact that so many other students at Stratham seemed to look up to Raja, that they seemed to see in him what she saw: a kind and gentle soul, a boy who would do anything for the people he loved. She had never dated a boy like this before, never believed she would, though, of course, it became evident to her after a while that she was not the only girl at Stratham who seemed to feel this way. In fact, for every boy that stopped by Raja’s dorm room in the evenings, there seemed to be at least twice as many girls, and it was mostly the girls that Chloe had a problem with. Usually, they’d come in unannounced, sit down on the edge of his bed, then begin to play with their hair or complain about their classes; or, other times, they’d just sit there at his computer and check their e-mail. Most of these girls were Indian, some of them very beautiful, and all of them clearly enamored of Raja. They seemed to regard Chloe with a vague disinterest, if they regarded her at all, and more often than not, they’d simply sit there and talk to Raja as if she herself were not in the room.
For the most part, she didn’t mind, didn’t let it get to her in the way she could have. She didn’t want to be that type of girlfriend, the type who allowed her own insecurities and fears to come into the picture. But still, there were moments when these girls could be so incredibly cold to her, so cold that she would find herself wanting to cry, and one night in particular when she did.
This was a night in early October, a few weeks after they’d started dating. She and Raja had been hanging out in his dorm room, eating Chinese takeout with a group of students from his floor. Chloe didn’t know most of these students very well, but she knew that at least one of them was a girl who had once dated Raja. For most of the night this girl had ignored her, but then at one point, after they’d had a couple of beers, she’d begun to probe into Chloe’s past, begun to ask her about her freshman year. Wasn’t she that freak girl? she wondered. That freak girl who
always showed up at parties by herself? What did they used to call her? she wondered. What was her name? No one else in the room, including Raja, seemed to know what this girl was referring to, but Chloe did, and after a moment she stood up and ran out of the room.
Later, when Raja caught up with her on the quad, on the small wooded pathway outside his dorm, she was crying uncontrollably. Without even hesitating, he ran up to her and embraced her.
“I don’t get it,” he said, stroking her hair. “What did she say? What was she talking about?”
But Chloe didn’t answer. It had been so long since she’d even thought about freshman year, so long since anyone had even alluded to it, that she’d allowed herself to believe that that part of her life was over, that it was behind her, that no one now even remembered it. But of course they had.
Later that night, as they lay in his bed, she told him the story. She told him about her first few months at Stratham. She told him about the weeks and months that followed, about the year and a half she spent in solitude. She told him everything with the sobering understanding that this might be the very last conversation she ever had with him. But, in the end, Raja didn’t waver. His eyes remained focused on hers, his expression one of concern rather than disappointment. And when she finally finished, he simply leaned over and put his hand on her head, pulled her toward him.
“I’m glad you told me,” he said, and then he kissed her on the lips. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that.”
“You don’t think I’m lame now?”
“Of course not.” He’d laughed. “In fact, I don’t think that would be possible.”
Then he slipped his arm around her body and pulled her over on top of him. He gripped her tightly, and she understood then what was happening, what he wanted.
She’d only had sex once before, with her high school boyfriend, Dustin O’Keefe, a few weeks before they’d left for college. That time she’d told herself that she was simply doing it to get it over with, so she wouldn’t have to enter college a virgin, but this time it was different. It still hurt a little, but it didn’t hurt in the way it had with Dustin. It hurt in a good way, and Raja himself was so unbelievably sweet to her, so unbelievably
gentle and calm, so confident in the way he touched her, that she almost forgot for a moment that she’d done this before.
Afterward, as they lay there sweating, Raja had leaned across the bed and mussed her hair. He’d smiled at her.
“How are you feeling?” he’d asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, right now, how do you feel?”
“I feel good.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she said. “Why? Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”
“No, no,” he said, laughing, kissing her arm. “I just wanted to be sure.”
The next few weeks seemed to pass in a blur. Later, Chloe would realize that these weeks had been among the happiest in her life: waking up next to Raja in the mornings, walking with him to morning classes, meeting up with him in the late afternoons for secret rendezvous in his room, going out at night with him and his friends to various bars and restaurants and private parties off campus. The rest of her life seemed to fall away. She no longer worked so assiduously on her papers, no longer worried so much about tests. She stopped checking e-mails, stopped answering phone calls, even stopped talking to Fatima, who would call her at least once a day and leave a message on her voice mail, asking her where she was. Everything else seemed to recede. Everything else except Raja. And for now, it seemed, Raja was enough.
It was impossible to explain, but she felt drawn to Raja in a way that she had never felt drawn to another human being before. And it didn’t seem to have anything to do with logic. She would be sitting there, trying to play it cool, trying to be restrained, and then all of a sudden she would see her hand reaching over and touching him, almost like it was out of her control. At times, it felt like being in a dream, the way you believe in a dream that you are in control of your actions, but then at one point you’ll see yourself doing something and you’ll realize you’re not. That’s how she felt around Raja. It was like there was a force outside of her that was stronger than her, and that force made it impossible for her not to be around him, or for her not to touch him when she was around him.
At the time, one of her favorite things to do with Raja was to meet up
with him in the evenings after class at his place of work, a small, dimly lit theater on the other side of campus, on the second-floor annex of the Dramatic Arts Building. As part of his work-study scholarship, Raja had been assigned the responsibility of screening films two or three times a week for the various film students and film classes at Stratham. Usually these films were obscure European films that Chloe had never heard of, but she still loved to watch them, and she especially loved to sneak up the back staircase of the Dramatic Arts Building and surprise Raja as he was screening them. Sometimes she’d bring along a large bag of popcorn and a six-pack of beer, and they’d sit there and stare down at the audience, bathed in the silver glow of the screen, transfixed by the images before them.
Afterward, once the audience had filed out, Raja would take her into one of the back rooms behind the projectionist’s booth, a large, dusty room filled with aisles and aisles of film stock, the entire library of the Stratham film department. Here he would point out masterpiece after masterpiece, explaining to her at great length why each one of these films was important or how each one had affected his life. Then he’d turn to her very casually and ask her to choose one.
“Won’t we get in trouble?” she’d asked him the first time he did this.
But he just smiled and shook his head. “I have the key,” he’d said and then patted his pocket. Then he’d looked around the room. “So,” he said, smiling, “which one will it be?”
And so, from the hours of midnight until four in the morning, at least two or three nights a week, they had watched some of the greatest cinematic masterpieces of the past fifty years. They had watched Bergman and Fassbinder, Truffaut and Godard. They had watched Michelangelo Antonioni’s
L’Avventura
and Satyajit Ray’s
Pather Panchali
. They had watched old documentaries by the Maysles Brothers and short independent films by American directors like Terrence Malick and John Cassavetes. They had watched these films with a deep reverence, perched there at the edge of the projectionist’s booth, looking down over the dark theater, the quiet whir of the projector lulling them into a sort of hypnotic trance. Sometimes Raja would stop the projector at an important scene and add his own commentary, explaining why the camera angle was brilliant or how the lighting was sublime. Other times, she’d just look over at him, and he’d seem transfixed, mesmerized, by what he was watching. Though he’d declared a major in chemistry, Chloe had known for some
time that this had been his father’s decision, not his, and that if Raja had it his way, he would have majored in film. But still, she never mentioned this, never even brought it up. The one time she’d even alluded to it, Raja had grown sullen and cold. To change his major at this point, he’d said, would be absurd.
“But don’t you ever think about it, though?” she’d asked as they walked along the quad. It was four in the morning, and they were just now returning from the theater, the campus around them silent and dark, everyone asleep in their dorms, the first brisk winds of autumn biting their faces.
Raja had been quiet for a long time after she’d asked him this. Then he’d looked at her sternly, the first time he’d ever looked at her this way.
“No,” he’d said finally. “To be honest, I never think about it.”
Later, when they got back to his dorm room, she’d apologized for bringing it up, and he’d said it was fine.
“It’s just that you seem to love it so much,” she’d said.
“I do,” he’d said. “But you don’t understand my family. For me to major in film, it would be an insult, a disgrace.”
“Even if you became a famous director?”
“Yeah,” he’d said, looking down. “Even if I became a famous director.”
Later, Chloe would regret this conversation, as it was one of the few awkward moments in what was otherwise a time of perfect bliss. It was also one of the last normal conversations she’d have with Raja before everything else turned south. The next night, when she returned to her dorm room after class, she’d received that fateful message from Richard on her voice mail:
World War Three here, Chlo. I’m serious. All’s not well on the home front
.
According to her brother, it had been building up for a while now, their parents’ troubles. He had seen it coming, he’d said. Ever since she’d left for college, their fights had been escalating, the unpleasantness growing. Their mother had been locking their father out of the house, he said, their father had been breaking things. One day he’d come home to find their father lying in his underwear on the living room floor, hungover. Another night he had found their mother sitting alone in her closet, packing up her shoes into boxes and weeping. It wasn’t just one problem in particular, he’d said, but the culmination of a lot of little problems, all of those years of unhappiness finally catching up with them. Or at least
that’s how they’d explained it to him the previous night at dinner when they’d told him what was going to be happening. He spoke very calmly as he told her this, but she could tell, even then, that he was worried. Not for himself, but for her.
“They’re going to be calling you tomorrow night,” he’d said, finally, “but I just wanted to give you a heads-up, you know, so you had a chance to prepare yourself.”
Chloe said nothing. She hadn’t started crying yet, that would come later; she was still trying to process it, still trying to understand what her brother was saying.
“Why don’t they just get a separation?” she’d asked finally. “I mean, really, why does it have to be so final?”
“I don’t know, Chlo,” he said.
There was another long silence, and then she said, “Well, who was it?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, who was it who asked for the divorce? Mom or Dad?”
“I don’t know, Chlo. I think they just kind of decided on it together, you know.”
“That’s impossible,” she said. “It’s always one person who asks, one person who brings it up first.”
Richard was quiet for a moment, then he said, “I don’t know. I mean, if I had to guess, I’d say Mom, but who knows? And, really, that’s not what you should be thinking about right now.”
“Well, then what the fuck should I be thinking about, Richard? I mean, really, please enlighten me.”
And just like that, she lost it. Just like that, it finally hit her, and before she knew it, she was crying, convulsing, trying to catch her breath, while her brother, on the other end of the line, was trying to comfort her, trying to apologize, telling her it would all be fine. Stoic Richard. Sensitive Richard. Her perfect, angelic older brother, reminding her that they had seen this coming for a while, that this had been a long time in the works. And she knew that he was right, of course. She had seen it herself that past summer: her father staying out late with his friend Dave Millhauser almost every night, her mother complaining about him at almost every turn, the two of them fighting for hours on end, in their bedroom, with the door closed. But still, as silly and as selfish as it sounded, she
would have still rather had them living together unhappily than living apart. And when she said this to Richard, he agreed. Then he sat there on the other end of the line for almost an hour, listening to her, as she did little more than cry.