Yes, My Accent Is Real (14 page)

We soon began to see more of each other; we even began holding hands in public. Without ever having “the Talk” we were becoming a couple. Grace taught me a lot of things about a lot of things. But she
really
taught me how to listen to music. Before Grace, for example, I never really thought that deeply about music. I mean I loved music, and I loved playing guitar and singing and such, but I never really had the bandwidth to comprehend how much good music there is in the world. I mainly listened to radio-
friendly bands like Dave Matthews and Creed and Jason Mraz, but she introduced me to a darker world of Radiohead and Björk.

“Listen to the lyrics, Kunal,” she always said. “Listen to what they're saying.”

As bubbly as she was, Grace always had an innate darkness to her. It may have been an actor thing. We're all masochistic.

“Listen to this song,” she said one day and played me Radiohead's “True Love Waits.” It didn't do much for me.

I suppose it was a new sound to me. I was mostly used to hearing songs in major keys. This was different. I didn't get it.

“
Listen
,” she said again. I listened a second time and I still struggled to feel whatever it was that she was trying to make me feel. She played it a third time and a fourth. Still nothing. Then she told me how the song had come to be made. I learned that Thom Yorke, who wrote the song, had read in the newspaper about a missing child who was trapped in a London cellar. The child survived for three days on only lollipops and crisps (potato chips). The song is about this missing child yearning to live, hence the lyric: “True love waits on lollipops and crisps.”

“Play it one more time,” I said.

And then I heard it.

“True love waits. True love waits. On lollipops and crisps.”

The song sprang to life in my heart. All the minor notes and the odd key shifts that didn't make sense began to flow through me like lava. It wasn't about the catchy chorus or the sing-a-long lyrics I was used to; it was about something real, and the connection I felt to that song in that moment was not something I had felt before.

I was intoxicated. I had fallen in love with Grace. I liked it.

She also taught me about things like vintage stores, ironic T-shirts, Converse sneakers, record stores, and the farmers' market. Soon I even started dressing like her, wearing red sneakers, bootleg jeans, and torn and scrubby ironic T-shirts. My favorite T-shirt to this day is a dirty white one that says “Brown” on it. She taught me how to make hummus and cucumber sandwiches on pita bread. Which is made exactly the way it sounds.
^III
She taught me how to explore my dark side. I've always been the kind of person who wakes up happy. If I'm having a bad day I can shake it off with a smile. But Grace encouraged me to explore something deeper. She asked me all sorts of questions about how I was feeling, and why. I was used to masking my pain through humor and she wanted me to wear my pain on my sleeve. She said, “It's okay to feel.” “You don't have to pretend.” “Enjoy the melancholy.”

Before I knew it I was drinking black coffee, smoking cigarettes, wearing torn jeans and vintage T-shirts, and listening to Radiohead on repeat. I was so emo and I was loving it. Because for the first time in America, I felt like I had an identity.

She taught me how to make love.

Many months flew by like this—hanging out in the park, listening to gut-wrenching music, laughing, watching old sketch comedy shows like
The State
and classic
SNL
. She loved making me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Grace was my first real-life girlfriend. And I was eating it up.

I
never thought about the fact that she would graduate in May. Or that she would ever graduate. Or that we would have to talk someday about our relationship, or anything that could ever take me away from my first true love.

Grace got cast in a play that I was not in. I was busy prepping for another play that semester. This meant that since she was in rehearsals all evening, I wouldn't have a chance to see her until 10:00 p.m. This began to gnaw at me. And all these thoughts began to creep into my brain. I envisioned her shooting the shit with her castmates, chatting and gossiping with them, maybe talking about our relationship. Maybe flirting with the other actors.

I began to see less and less of her. This led to a vicious cycle: the less I saw of her, the more I
wanted
to see her. I remember calling her cell phone as soon as the rehearsals ended at ten o'clock, and sometimes she would call me right back but sometimes she wouldn't. Sometimes I wouldn't get a call back until ten thirty. Sometimes eleven. Sometimes not at all.

One night I called her at 10:10 (I knew she'd be home), no answer, then 10:17, no answer, then at 10:45 she picked up the phone.

“I just got home,” she said.

“Don't rehearsals end at ten?” I could hear the desperation in my voice.

“Dude,” she said. “Dude, just relax, okay?”

Dude.
Dude?

We eventually did hang out that night. All would be well. It's interesting how we can go from severe insecurity about a relationship to absolute security as soon you see that person face-to-face. We make monsters in our head when we're alone, and they just as quickly vanish when you're together. All I wanted was to see her, to
make her happy. But part of me was beginning to turn resentful. I wanted her to
know
that I was trying to make her happy, and I wanted
her
to know that
I
knew that
she
wasn't working as hard for
my
happiness. For example, I knew that she wanted to go to the Rufus Wainwright concert. The tickets were expensive but I wanted her to be happy, so for her birthday I bought her one ticket.
One
ticket.

My gift was laced with acid. I wanted her to see that they were expensive and that she should feel guilty that she could go and I could not. I wanted to kill her with kindness so she could never leave me.

“Dude, this is silly, you have to come with me!” she said.

I let her ask me three or four times before I acquiesced and bought a ticket for myself. At the concert I sang loudly to “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk.”

“Shhhhhhhhhhh,” she said. “Don't sing, just listen.” That hurt my feelings. Everything was hurting my feelings. You see, it wasn't about her anymore; it was beginning to become about me.

One night I arrived late to a party and saw her leaning against a tree, smoking, talking to a guy covered in tattoos. He was strong looking, ripped in ways that I was not. He was wearing a whole string of earrings. He looked so damn cool, and I could tell from his body language that he liked her. Worse, I had a feeling that she liked him, too.

“I'm Jeff,” he said, shaking my hand.

“Strong grip,” I said, wishing I had met his hand with the same force.

“Hi, baby,” I said to Grace.

She side-hugged me and kissed me on the cheek. Not on the lips. On the cheek. Was she distant? I couldn't tell anymore. The three of us
made some dumb, uneasy small talk and I learned that Jeff loved surfing and dogs, and that he drove a green Volkswagen bus.

“I'm not feeling that great,” I said, hoping Grace would take her eyes off this guy and go home with me.

“Oh, do you mind if I stay?” she asked.

“Of course not,” I lied.

I hugged her good-bye and we didn't kiss, again. I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was the kind of feeling that just grows, and it grows and grows and grows and you can't do anything about it.

The next morning I had to drive to the grocery store to pick up some batteries, and by coincidence (not by coincidence) I passed Grace's house. I looked at her place like I always did. And parked next to her door was a green Volkswagen bus.

I took a breath and decided to call her from the car, just to see how she would react.

“Hey, I'm at the store; want something?” I asked.

Silence.

“No, I'm good,” she finally said. “See you later?”

I drove home, shaking with anger, sadness, confusion. All the monsters in my head were coming true.

I didn't call her all day. Around 10:20 p.m. my phone rang.

“Come over tonight,” she said.

“I saw his bus.”

She didn't say anything. Her silence made her sound like she was staring at the floor.

“Did you hook up?”

She began to cry and said, “I don't want to break up with you, Kunal, but what's the point? I'm graduating soon. In May I'm gone. So what are we doing anyway?” Her response was brilliant. She had accomplished several things:

1. She didn't confess to hooking up with him.

2. But she didn't deny it.

3. She didn't break up with me.

4. But she implied that we should be broken up.

We had reached an unspoken stalemate. We were still boyfriend and girlfriend without being boyfriend and girlfriend.

A few days later, while I was driving by her place, I saw the green Volkswagen bus again.
That fucking bus
. But I pretended that the situation didn't exist. Out of sight, out of mind. Except I saw the green bus again the next day. Then the next day I saw it again. Soon the green bus was parked outside her apartment every night. It became an open secret that everyone knew about, including me. But I just didn't want to accept it. I just wanted her to love me. I wanted her back.

I decided I was going to fight for what we once had. I was going to fight for love. I was going to win her back.

“For her birthday, we're going to go to her house and win her over with a song,” I told Caleb, a friend in the theater department who I knew could play guitar.

“Of course, great idea,” said Caleb. I loved his positivity. There was no judgmental scolding of “Kunal, dude, she's cheating on you, forget this witch.” Everyone loved Grace—even then—and they understood why I wanted her back in my life.