Strangers at the Feast (9 page)

Her mother had named her for Ginger Rogers, and seemed forever disappointed that Ginny couldn’t sing or dance or watch a Ginger Rogers movie without passing out on the couch before the final credits.

Also, her namesake churned through five husbands. Ginny was lagging.

Several years earlier, her mother sat Ginny down: “I want you to know that if you are a lesbian, I am okay with that.” This sentiment was undercut by the fact that her mother whispered
lesbian.
“Your father and I accept you no matter who you are.”

“Mom, my problem is that I date too many men, not too few.” Ginny knew lesbians aplenty, and often thought it would simplify her life if she could rally to the cause. There had been a few halfhearted, clumsy attempts in college; she just didn’t have it in her.

“But you never seem able to settle on one, and I have to ask myself, as your mother, what is
wrong
. I wish you could find a man like Douglas.”

“Douglas is my
brother.
”

“Someone
like
him. Denise says Jodie Foster is a lesbian. She also went to Yale.”

“If I go on
Jeopardy!,
I can take Homosexual Oscar Winners for five hundred dollars.”

“It’s just… don’t you think it’s awkward, teaching what you teach, and… Ginny, friends ask me what you are doing, what you are
teaching, and when I say family studies, they ask, quite naturally, does she have a family of her own.”

“If I taught ancient Egyptian history, would they ask if I was ancient Egyptian?”

“How is a mother supposed to have a serious conversation with her daughter when everything is a clever answer?” When her mother slipped into the third person she was minutes away from tears.

“I’ve told you a million times, Mom, it wasn’t until the fifties that Americans began marrying in their late teens—and only because they were so traumatized by the war. At the turn of the nineteenth century, a single twenty-five-year-old woman was the statistical norm.”

Of course, Ginny wasn’t exactly twenty-five.

“Oh, none of it even matters to you!”

Which wasn’t true. But Ginny believed in putting on a brave face. When she was young her father had told her that it was important not to rub her disappointments in people’s faces, and not to ask for pity. The lesson—one of the few her father had ever imparted—resonated. Because she understood, even as a child, why he was saying it. Her mother always seemed so… fragile. So Ginny would reveal anger, or annoyance—but not pain. When she was feeling lousy, this was a small act of heroism she could perform. She could at least say,
I protected someone.

Her mother would simply never understand how things had changed for women Ginny’s age. They had the right to work, the right to pursue careers, but they were dating men who had been raised by housewives, women like her mother who sent them off to school each day with neatly packed lunch boxes, each containing a favorite sandwich, a juice box, a bag of yogurt raisins, and a peeled carrot they were told they absolutely must eat if they cared at all about their mothers’ wishes or a vitamin A deficiency; mothers who sewed buttons and baked bread and served warm milk with honey before tucking them in; women who, in all matters of finance and business and geography, deferred to their husbands. So even though their girlfriends worked
the same hours, slaving away under the same fluorescent lights, staring at the same dull gray cubicle walls, even though their girlfriends, on occasion, made more money, that childhood image of a woman in an apron who offered steaming mashed potatoes and who kissed their earlobes wasn’t shaken. Without realizing it, these guys expected their girlfriends to come home from the office, set down their pink laptop bags, slide a meat loaf in the oven, do a quick mop of the kitchen, and serve them scotch and soda after dinner, before giving them a gentle foot rub or, if they were lucky, a blow job.

And these were the
nice
guys.

The ones who would wash dishes if asked, who understood the concept of fabric softener.

These men were caught between two wildly different generations. Ginny imagined them as time travelers, baffled by the wacky women of the future, squinting at their confidence and capability—
Jeez, these girls change tires
and
write books!—
as if the women had lasers streaming from their eyes.

To Ginny, it felt like the Copernican Revolution: men had just learned the sun didn’t orbit the earth and weren’t taking it well.

Certainly what Ginny had seen of her parents’ marriage hadn’t sent her sprinting to the altar.

Disputes over napkins versus paper towels. Her mother’s lifelong complaint that she could not clean the back deck without moving her father’s telescope, which he had forbidden. Her father’s glare of disapproval as her mother, upon exiting a restaurant, pawed dinner mints into her purse. The biannual excavation of the refrigerator, her father extracting the half-and-half, the cream cheese, the Zabar’s egg salad, incredulously announcing the months-old expiration dates. “September ’04! Eleanor, you are trying to poison me.”

Her mother would sniff each one, insisting that any vaguely sane person could intuit when the cottage cheese had gone bad. Expiration dates were for the weak and the profligate. They were the work of lawyers, to prevent frivolous food-poisoning lawsuits, and sent
perfectly good food down the disposal.
Three hundred years ago, Ginny, did the pioneers churn butter and put a date on it?

Growing up, Ginny couldn’t understand why they’d married. Until she found a photo of their wedding day. Posed on the steps of city hall in Columbus, Georgia, her father clasped one of her mother’s hands and braced her back in a mock dip so that the sunlight caught their faces in profile, as though they had no interest in anyone but each other. At twenty and twenty-one they were great physical specimens. Her father’s broad shoulders beautifully complemented her mother’s elegant neck. They were young, attractive, healthy, horny, and—from the date on the picture—her father was about to go to Vietnam.

Ginny was looking for something that might endure.

And a couple of times, she thought she had found it.

After her book of poetry came out, she was invited to teach in NYU’s graduate writing program. Her seminar, Poetic Histories, met in the afternoons every spring, and as the weather got warmer, the first few minutes of class were consumed by the inevitable debate over whether to open the windows and spend the hour discussing poetry to the sound of jackhammers, or to listen unhindered to one another’s insightful observations on the poetic process, and die of heatstroke.

Ratu always made his way to the window, either to rattle it open or to bring it thudding closed, the self-appointed climate controller. He was from Fiji, and wrote poems about his fisherman father.

All the girls flirted with him. He wore his long dark hair in a ponytail. He carried exactly four pencils and sharpened them to a lethal point before class and set them beside his notebook. When anyone spoke, he blew on the tip of his pencil and intensely took notes.

He was twenty-three, and it never occurred to Ginny that he might harbor romantic interest in her. But they were seated in her office late one afternoon, the light outside darkening, going over his poem “Bird of an Ancient Land” when the fire alarm blared. She
was ready to shrug it off and keep working—the alarms were always being tripped—but Ratu stood and took her hand. “Come, Ginger, it is best to be safe.” He led her down seventeen flights of a dark gray stairway, insisting on carrying her tote bag. When was the last time a man had carried her bag?

As the fire trucks appeared, she said, “I have an idea.”

At a café on Waverly Place, over herbal tea, Ratu told a story about a terrible fire in his village, Savusavu, started by a French tourist who had fallen asleep smoking in his beach-front rental. The fire burned ten homes, including Ratu’s. He said it was the first time he had seen his father weep. He stared at Ginny, his eyes a lustrous mahogany.

The small table and the dim lights of the café unleashed in her a feeling of intimacy.

“You should write about it,” she said. “You’re quite talented with narratives. And you make great use of Fijian history. You see, in ‘Bird of an Ancient Land’…” She set his manuscript on the table and slid her chair beside his so they could examine his poem. She glanced around to see who else from the university might be there.

Her students were graduate level, a few of them older than she was, but a classroom triggered certain dynamics, particular boundaries. Whatever maternal urges Ginny had were directed toward her students; she asked endless questions about their dating lives and vacation plans. She brought chips and sodas to class, and always, on a student’s birthday, produced a cake with candles.

But with Ratu she had refrained from asking questions, and in the café she realized it was because she had a small crush she’d been keeping in check. Whenever her students turned in poems, she read his first, with an unusual excitement, studying them for clues about what kind of person he was. It did not displease her to see him muscle open the window.

“Your use of juxtaposition is really good, Ratu. Eighty percent of good artistry is knowing what to put next to what.” He shifted his leg beneath the table and it came to rest against hers; she found herself
afraid of what silence would bring. “There was this famous editing experiment in 1918. Lev Kuleshov, a Russian filmmaker, edited a short film using static images of an actor’s face alternated with shots of a plate of soup, a girl at play, and a coffin. After seeing this montage, audience members raved about the actor’s varied emotional expressions—pensiveness, happiness, sorrow—when, in fact, the image of the actor was the same in all the shots. Viewers created narratives based merely on the sequence of images, and on their reactions to those images. It’s called the Kuleshov Effect.”

She began straightening the sugars and the Equals in the dispenser.

“You are an amazing woman, Ginger. Brilliant. When you were my age, you were already published.”

His compliment was lost in the thud of the word
age
—she was thirty-three, ten years his senior—and she couldn’t stop the blush invading her cheeks. He reached for her hand.

“You’re my student,” she said, but didn’t pull her hand away.

He walked her home that night and came upstairs, and from then on they were inseparable.

Every night, he sat on her bed and slowly brushed his thick hair, smoothing on coconut oil. His chest, tattooed with birds and trees, glowed in her reading lamp. On his right hip, a long, narrow leaf tattoo, feathered with veins, contained the scripted words
Tagane Vuka,
which he said meant “he who can fly.” Before sleep, he flossed for a good ten minutes; with an orange rubber tip, he probed the soft arcs of his gums. He rinsed with a bright green fluoride treatment she had last seen as a child. His father and grandfather had lost their teeth at a young age, and Ratu, terrified of decay, avoided sweets and sodas.

In the afternoons Ratu swam three miles in the university pool, furious butterfly and crawl strokes. For the rest of the day, she could smell chlorine on his hair.

He always woke early to make the coffee, and when Ginny showered, he made the bed. By 9:00 a.m., he was off to the library to
work on freelance articles, so that his afternoons could be devoted to poetry. He was a man who had never been handed a single thing.

“You work so hard,” she said one night while she was reading census data. He sat in the corner, typing away on his laptop, working on an article for
Technology Today
. “You need to give yourself a little time off.”

“Ginger, I’m under a lot of pressure from my family.” He craned his neck. “To make money, to send money home. The ones who get out, we have responsibility. And with the Internet, oh, I hate the Internet. My uncle came to America years ago, and we would wait to hear from him by mail. Maybe once a month, on birthdays and holidays, he might call. Now my father goes to the Internet café every day to e-mail me. ‘Ratu, what are you doing? How much are you earning? Your grandmother’s kidney is failing.’ That I have chosen to be a poet is not their dream. My father thinks I should drive a taxicab. He’s never owned a car and he thinks any job that gives you a car to drive is the jackpot. That is his favorite word:
jackpot
.”

“Ratu, I’ll give you money. Don’t waste your time writing reviews of noise-canceling headphones.”

“I couldn’t ask that of you, Ginger.”

“You didn’t ask, I offered.”

Sending off the money allowed Ratu to relax. The summer was a delight. Mornings they each went off to write, but by day’s end they’d meet at the market and buy fruit and bread and wine and spend the evening sprawled on a blanket in Madison Square Park, reading poetry to each other.

By August, he showed Ginny a one-act play he had written in the voice of his father; she thought it was quite good.

“Good? Not excellent?”

“I’m no expert in plays. Why don’t you send it out and see what people say?”

“You say that like it’s so easy. If you wrote a play, you’re Ginger Olson, people will look at it! You are a respected academic. I don’t even have my MFA!”

Ginny showed it to Ari Edleson, a college friend who had spent years directing theater in Japan and London and who had just moved back to New York.

“Gin, it lags in the middle, the end, and the beginning. Fishing is not inherently dramatic, and certainly not to the New York theater crowd.”

“He’s the voice of Fiji, Ari. The first Fijian poet/playwright. You can
market
him. Fuck, tell people Fijian drama is all about lagging, it’ll be authentic lagging, like the long, slow days in the South Pacific.”

“You’re in love,” Ari said.

The play went nowhere, and Ratu began work on a novel about a young Fijian moving to Manhattan. He believed this had market potential. But he confided in Ginny another pressure. Once he got his MFA, his student visa would expire. The only way he could stay in the country was to get an Aliens of Extraordinary Ability visa, nearly impossible for an unpublished writer.