Authors: Andrew Porter
The next morning, with only an hour’s worth of sleep, she had decided to skip her morning classes and go over to the other side of campus, to a small, shaded park bench that overlooked the river. Here, sitting on the edge of the bench, she had smoked cigarette after cigarette and continued to cry. She thought about calling up Raja, but decided against it. Instead, she just sat there, thinking about the ramifications of it all, what this would mean for her now. She wondered what family holidays would be like now, what it would be like to go home for Christmas. She wondered where her parents would live, who would get the house, would they sell it? She wondered what it would feel like to see her parents with other people, if they in fact remarried, or what it would be like to talk to them now, separately, as adults. In the distance, she could see a group of students on the quad, tossing around a football in the leaves, the sky above them overcast and dark. For the first time in a long time, for the first time in almost a year, she’d wished she were home in Houston.
Finally, around noon, she had called up her mother but had caught her on the way to an appointment. There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and then her mother had expressed her anger at Richard for telling her.
This isn’t how I’d wanted you to find out
, she’d said, but before she could finish, Chloe hung up. Later that day, when her father called, she’d let his phone call go to voice mail, then listened to his message over and over, his roundabout, circumspect explanation for why this had happened:
Your mother and I have been together for a long time, darling … We love each other very much, of course, but sometimes love isn’t enough. Sometimes life gets complicated …
She wondered if he was drunk, if he was reciting this speech from a bar. In the background, she could hear glasses clinking, people laughing. She wondered if he was even living at home.
All day long she had been thinking about Raja, wanting to talk to him, wanting to tell him what had happened, wanting to answer the numerous voice messages he had left on her phone. Almost every hour for the past six hours he had left her at least one message or sent her a text, wondering where she was. But there was still a part of her that
didn’t want to get into it with him, to expose herself so openly at such an early stage in their relationship. So instead of returning his calls, she had called up Fatima and asked to come over.
“You’re still alive?” Fatima had said sarcastically when she’d called. “Really? I thought you might have died.” But then she must have heard something in Chloe’s voice, maybe Chloe sniffling, because she stopped. “Hey honey,” she’d said, softly now. “What’s the matter?”
Chloe didn’t answer.
“Honey?”
“Can I please come over?”
“Of course,” Fatima said, her voice suddenly concerned. “Come right now.”
At Fatima’s house, Chloe unloaded. She told her everything, everything she couldn’t tell Raja, how she hated her parents now for doing this, how she hated them even more for the way they were handling it, for talking to her in platitudes, for telling her brother first, for not trying harder to make it work.
“So you’re having some trouble with your marriage,” she’d said. “Big deal. Go to therapy then. Work it out. You don’t have to get a fucking divorce.”
And Fatima, whose own parents were divorced, sympathized. “People are weak,” she’d said finally. “The older I get, the more I realize this.”
And so, on and on they went, late into the night, drinking glass after glass of wine, smoking cigarette after cigarette, ranting and raving about their parents, sharing war story after war story, commiserating about their pasts, philosophizing about the pointlessness of marriage. Meanwhile, Chloe’s voice mail was filling up with messages, messages from her mother, her father, Richard, Raja. Chloe ignored them all and kept drinking. And then, at one point, Fatima had pulled out the small stash of marijuana from beneath her sink and rolled a joint. Sitting at her kitchen table, they had smoked the entire thing down to its nub. Then they’d gone into her living room and tried to watch TV, but the images on the screen were moving too fast, and after a while Chloe began to feel sick. A few minutes later, she was out in the yard behind Fatima’s house, getting sick on the lawn. In the doorway behind her, she could see Fatima, silhouetted by the light from the kitchen and then, a moment later, another figure, standing beside her. She squinted her eyes, trying to make out
who the figure was, but she couldn’t tell. Then the figure moved out of the shadows, and her eyes adjusted, and she suddenly knew.
“It’s going to be okay,” Raja was saying now as he moved across the lawn, and then, kneeling down beside her on the cool grass, he held her in his arms. “Fatima told me,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
She was crying now, and he was holding her head, and suddenly the world was slowing down. He continued to whisper to her, things she couldn’t remember, and she continued to cry. She could smell the stale odor of cigarettes on his jacket, the stench of beer on his breath. She asked him where he’d been, but he didn’t answer. He just kept rubbing her shoulders, comforting her, just as he had that first night they met. And when she looked up at him finally, she noticed for the first time a cut along his cheek, a swelling around his eye.
“Hey,” she said. “What the hell happened to your face?”
But he just shook his head. “We’ll talk about that later,” he said. “Another time. The main thing right now is that we get you home.”
And she realized then, when he said this, that he meant his dorm room, that he meant his dorm room was home.
LATER, SHE WOULD WONDER
whether any of this would have ever happened had she simply returned his phone calls that day, had she not gone over to Fatima’s house. If he had been with her, instead of with his friends, then he would have never ended up at the Cove that night and would have never run into those boys. He would have never known who Tyler Beckwith was, and Tyler Beckwith would have never ended up in the hospital. But this was all pointless to think about now.
The truth was, at the time, she had no idea what had happened that night, and Raja himself had said little about it. When she’d asked him about it the following day, he’d been evasive, vague, saying only that there’d been an altercation, a misunderstanding, and that he didn’t want to go into it. It wasn’t worth recounting, he’d said. It was really pretty stupid. But through his friends, Seung and Sahil, both of whom had been there that night, she had learned other things.
She had learned that a boy named Tyler Beckwith had come up to Seung that night at the bar and gotten in his face. She had learned that Seung had been standing on the other side of the bar, talking with Tyler Beckwith’s girlfriend—a short, pale-faced girl from his modern architecture class—and that Tyler Beckwith hadn’t liked this. In fact, before Seung knew it, Tyler was up in his face, pushing him around, calling him shit. Yellow face. Chink. All the worst things he could think of. It was like something from a dream, Seung said. Totally unprovoked. The guy was clearly drunk. Anyway, at one point, Raja had stepped in and tried to defend him, had tried to break things up, and that’s when Tyler had pushed Raja, and then Raja had come back at him full force. After that, what had happened had been a blur. All they knew was that Raja had ended up pinning this guy Tyler down on the floor of the bar and humiliating
him in front of everyone, including his girlfriend. Even made him apologize, Seung said. Wouldn’t let him up till he did.
“Don’t forget,” Seung added. “Our boy used to play rugby.”
“Raja?”
Seung nodded. “You didn’t know?”
“No,” Chloe said, shaking her head, because she didn’t. This was the first she’d heard of it, and like so many other things about Raja, it just didn’t add up. None of it did. The picture that Seung and Sahil had painted of him was simply impossible to reconcile with her own image of him. She knew that he was physically strong, of course, and that he was much taller than most other boys, and yet she would have never pegged him for the type to get in a fight, especially a bar fight.
Still, whenever she brought it up to Raja, he’d change the subject or else claim that everything that Seung and Sahil had told her was bullshit, exaggeration.
“Well, is it true that you used to play rugby?” she’d asked him one night, as they were sitting in his room.
He looked at her then and finally nodded. “For a semester,” he said. “My freshman year. Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just that rugby seems like such a violent game, you know, and you seem like such a pacifist.”
“I am a pacifist,” he said.
“Except when you’re beating up guys in bars, right?”
She winked at him, but she could tell he didn’t like the joke.
“That was a mistake,” he said finally, and then he turned around, and that was the last time they ever talked about it.
In fact, from that point on, she never mentioned it again. Instead, they talked about other things. They talked about the people in Raja’s dorm who were hooking up, the various dramas on his hall. They talked about the shortcomings of the new administration, about the hypocrisy of certain professors, about the latest articles they’d been reading in the
Huffington Post
. They talked about everything, it seemed, but Raja’s run-in at the bar and her parents’ divorce. Chloe had told him one night, after venting for nearly an hour, that she didn’t want to talk about the divorce anymore, that it was too painful for her, that it was easier for her to just forget about it, to ignore it, to put it out of her mind, and Raja, in his own indirect way, had respected this.
Whatever’s going to make you feel better
,
he’d said, and then she’d told him that the only thing that was going to make her feel better was to be with him.
Meanwhile, at home, the drama was unfolding: the hiring of divorce lawyers, the reallocation of assets, the dividing up of property, the negotiations over ownership. Chloe found out about these things only in bits and pieces, through Richard, or occasionally through her father, who would call her up every few days to complain about her mother and how she was “raping” him.
It was strange, but during this entire time she rarely thought about her father. Their relationship had been so strained for so long now. It had been so long since she could even remember having a normal conversation with him, a conversation that didn’t end in a fight or involve a disagreement of some sort. Gone were those days when she used to stay up late at night waiting for him to come home from work. Gone were the days when she used to sit around the kitchen table, talking with him about current events, arguing about this thing or that. The U.S. involvement in Iraq, the energy crisis, the latest indiscretion of the Bush administration. Arguing about political events had been their way of bonding for so long. It had been a thing that they’d done together all through high school, and yet somewhere along the way something had changed. Their friendly disagreements had turned into something else, a full-on war that had nothing at all to do with politics and had everything instead to do with her mother and the way her father was treating her. The way he had disappeared emotionally. The way he had stopped coming home for dinner. The way he had started spending his weekends out in the yard, working on the garden for hours on end, ignoring everyone else, and stopping only at the end of the day to read the newspaper, by himself, at the edge of the pool.
One night, after class, she was trying to explain all of this to Raja as they sat over drinks at the Cove. Raja had nodded at her as she told him the story, but she couldn’t help noticing something different in his face, his eyes. He seemed preoccupied, distant, and when she finally asked him if anything was wrong, he’d been evasive.
“I’m just tired,” he’d said. “Too much chemistry, you know.” Then he’d patted her on the hand and winked.
Later that night, they were joined by Seung and his girlfriend, Bae. Chloe had only met Bae once before and had never really liked her, but that night she seemed different. More animated perhaps, lively. She and
Seung had been drinking since noon, Seung announced when they first arrived, and perhaps that was part of the reason. They had been making the rounds of almost every bar in town, he’d said, and then he’d proceeded to recount their journey in exhaustive detail. Bar by bar, drink by drink.
Later, he and Raja had gotten into an argument about the latest president of the Asian Student Alliance. Seung seemed to think that this latest president was too relaxed, too complacent, too easy to please. He didn’t have enough fire in him, he said. But Raja pointed out that the previous president, Samantha Cho, had done little more than alienate the entire administration with her constant protests and complaints.
“But at least she wasn’t afraid,” Seung had said. “At least she wasn’t afraid to speak her mind.”
“Oh, no.” Raja had laughed. “I’ll give you that. She definitely spoke her mind.”
Raja and Seung often had fights like this—Seung accusing Raja of being too restrained, Raja accusing Seung of being too extreme—but usually Raja backed off after a couple of minutes, realizing that he could never win an argument with Seung, especially when he was drunk.
But that night something was different. Maybe it was the alcohol, or the lateness of the evening, but Raja didn’t back down, and after a while Seung grew frustrated and started to brood. At one point, a full minute passed in silence, and then Seung finally looked up at Raja and said, “Look, Raj, it’s like that thing with that sign on your door, you know. You’re not going to do anything about that, fine, but that’s the type of thing we should be bringing to the administration, you know. People need to know about that. People should be getting expelled over that shit.”
Chloe looked over at Raja, but he was looking down.
“What sign?” she asked.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“He didn’t tell you about it?” Seung said. Then he looked at Bae. “Unbelievable.”
“Can we please talk about something else,” Raja said, shooting Seung a glare that seemed to silence him.