Do you know why you’re here? the woman asks me.
I think so, I say. My hands start shaking.
You okay? she says.
I’m an adjunct, I say. I shouldn’t be so scared and want to tell her what I know and I’m relieved somehow that something’s being done.
If anyone tries to retaliate against you, she says, you can file a complaint.
So, while I’m unemployed and out this paltry salary that keeps us afloat, I will come up here and cry to her and she will write it down.
Do you want to start? she says, after a back-and-forth about my not being under investigation, after my saying I do have some information about behavior that is questionable.
I have specific questions, she says. But why don’t you go first.
I tell her the same thing I told the dean just days ago. She asks me for names but I won’t give them to her. She repeats back to me, a friend of your student’s friend, and I nod and she types and I feel dumb.
Is that all? she says.
Maybe, then, it’s nothing, I think. Maybe, then, I’ve gotten all this wrong. I think there’s not language, much less legal recourse, for what I’ve just described to her. What is the statute, the law, the bullet point laid out on the university website, for feeling less than, knocked down, not quite in control, all of the time?
I want to tell her the names of all the professors who never looked at me when I walked by them, when I was in a circle of people talking to them, how it felt like there were prerequisites for being heard or read that had nothing to do with what I thought I’d come there to try to do or say or be or learn. How it felt like smart was one thing for the men, obvious and uncomplicated, often self-appointed; the women who were chosen were anointed instead of self-selected, brilliant, they were called instead, which felt like it demanded more of the senses, which always seemed to be attributed to girls some of the male professors liked to look at during and after class.
I think of Sasha then and how she would almost certainly have a concrete grievance in this situation. Someone would have done something to her. If we were still talking, I could talk on her behalf.
Is there anything else you might want to tell me? asks the lawyer.
I’m confused now. I feel almost impossibly tired.
Did a student report anything more specific to you? she says.
She tells me a story then that I haven’t heard: a student overhearing this same professor in his office with another student, hearing sounds that sounded inappropriate, watching the student and the professor walk out mussed up.
We were told she reported this to you and you reported it to Melissa, who did not follow up with us.
Melissa, who’s been kinder to me than most anyone.
None of that’s true, I tell her.
She nods.
It’s not. I feel somehow now like I’m accidentally on his side. False allegations is what I’m saying. Who would say that? I want to ask. I want to give her something irrefutable, but I don’t have anything like that.
But the other stuff, I say.
She names the student who supposedly told me this story.
I don’t know her, I say.
Melissa’s wonderful, I tell her. It’s an adjective that means nothing, least of all to lawyers. She’s one of the most supportive people, especially to women, in this whole place, I say.
All right, says the lawyer.
She’s stopped writing down any of what I say.
* * *
I don’t go back to work. I miss a meeting, but I text my co–homeroom teachers; I ask them to tell my boss that there’s an issue with my kids. I text the babysitter and tell her that I will get the kids from school and I get on the train and pick them up. They’re surprised to see me and they smile at me and I pick them up and it feels like the first time I’ve breathed in days. I take them to the park and they play and I watch them and then I take them home and we have dinner and I bathe them and I put them to bed.
* * *
I call Melissa. I tell her about my conversation with the lawyer.
I think somehow, I say, you’ve been accused of something?
She’s quiet a long time.
I just wanted you to know, I say. None of what she said is true, I tell her, about the lawyer.
I know, she says. Thanks for telling me.
We talk a long time without either of us saying anything substantive. She tells me about her classes, her dog’s second round of chemo. We talk as if, if we keep talking, some of what we’ve both just learned will make more sense, but it does not.
* * *
I hear my phone buzz and beep around 2:30. I remember that those stupid Instagram stories track who watches when you watch them. I know before I know that Sasha’s found me out.
I don’t know how to do this, her text says. Tell me I won’t do it wrong.
Our two-year-old is sleeping with us, curled up in a ball against my stomach, hot-skinned, breath thick with phlegm from her never-ending late-spring cold. I pull her closer to me and I hold my phone, staring at the screen with her name up at the top, then back down at the baby’s hands that she has wrapped around my other wrist.
WHY DON’T YOU call her? asks the Chilean writer. I’ve left work already and we sit and split a large plate of eggs and vegetables and French fries at a small, large-windowed restaurant on West Tenth Street in the middle of the day.
We don’t talk, I say.
The only other patron in the restaurant is an old woman with long, thick hair wearing all black.
I say: So much time has passed.
The Chilean writer’s shoulders hunch and her shirt dips in the middle. She has a mole on her right clavicle; her bones are long and thin.
I can’t look at her. For a long time I thought she’d be the person who would somehow make me be okay, I say.
The Chilean writer nods, as if we are all, at some point, this deluded.
I was only good at needing from her, I say. When she needed me, I failed.
The Chilean writer stays very quiet, stirs some milk into her coffee.
She lost a baby, I say. Years ago. We were still children.
I can feel her face get closer to me.
I left her, I say.
It sounds less violent than I feel it. The Chilean writer sips her coffee and looks past me toward the door.
More than once, I say. I say it louder than I meant to and she faces me again.
There is no Big Awful Crime I’ve hidden. I want to hold the Chilean writer’s face tight in my hands and make sure that she knows that sometimes violences are small and subtle, but that only makes them harder to make sense of, to figure out how they might be forgiven, how one might make amends for them later on.
At every moment that she might have needed me to be there, I say, I shut down and disappeared.
I’M TWENTY-TWO AND Sasha’s twenty-three. I live in New York and don’t want, anymore, to be in grad school; grad school seems meant to last a thousand years, and all we talk about is how precarious our lives will still be once we’re done. I sleep with a Victorian literature scholar who asks to hold his hands around my neck while we have sex. I let him because I feel I should be grateful to him for wanting to fuck me. He’s only the third person that I’ve slept with, none of them having stuck around more than a few days or weeks.
She has an extra room in her apartment in Taipei, where she’s gone to learn Mandarin and teach English and have an adventure, because the prestigious fellowship to which she applied did not let her in. She says Come and I have the security deposit from my apartment and want so much to be with her. I think, secretly, that if I go to her, that she’ll make everything okay. I get approval for a semester free of coursework and of teaching, in exchange for not taking a stipend. I imagine that our talking can make everything better, like it used to, that being close to her, watching her live, somehow will teach me how to be as well.
* * *
She gets stoned every mornin
g and again at night and we watch The West Wing over and over; when we watch the episode in which there is a crisis between Taiwan and China, it feels as if the threat is real. My mom is shipping me the Wellbutrin that I’ve been prescribed but I don’t take it; I’ve never taken it. I can’t say why except to say it feels like an assertion somehow of control. Sasha cooks large, indulgent meals after her last joint of the day and is desperate that I join. She buys cheap bottles of wine, and I sip my single glass and she downs the rest.
It’s so hot. We think we know hot, coming from Florida, but there’s no breeze from the ocean and all the concrete mixed with all the smog, the air’s not just hot but thick and every time we go outside we’re wet with sweat within blocks. She takes her clothes off as soon as she gets home from work, peeling shirt, then pants, and walks around the apartment in her bra and underwear, gesturing and talking, pulling her hair up off her neck. I sit, fully clothed, on the couch and I stay quiet. She wants, she says, over and over—sex, love, a feeling so intense that it jolts her out of the stasis and the strangeness of our lives in this place; I sit quiet in the corner, wondering why, but also knowing, I can’t be that for her. She misses that specific brand of power that comes from male attention—in Taipei, with her height, her brashness, and her volume, men don’t look at her like they did at home. What she wants, what she misses, is being wanted, which is a thing I’ve never wholly had a hold of. I’m relieved at first, that we’re alike like that here.
I read Anita Brookner on my mattress on the floor in my small room with the less-well-working air conditioner. I read Jean Rhys, D. H. Lawrence, Colm Tóibín, Deborah Eisenberg, Iris Murdoch, Barbara Comyns, Penelope Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Jane Bowles, more Faulkner and Woolf. I like the tighter, sharper, domestic stories; I prefer Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop to her more famous The Blue Flower, Tóibín’s Nora Webster breaks my heart. I carry pieces of the Eisenberg stories in my head and play them over and over as I ride the subway, as everyone around me says words that I don’t understand, because the time something was happening, of course, you didn’t know what it was like … It really wasn’t like anything—it was just whatever it was, and there was never a place in your mind the right size and shape to put it. But afterwards, the thing fit exactly into your memory as if there had always been a place—just right, just waiting for it. Taiwan feels like this: Southeast Asia. My friend Leah keeps emailing asking how I’m doing in Thailand. Sasha and I have jobs teaching wealthy Taiwanese kids whose parents all have homes in the US. We make more money than I have any need for. Our rent and food is cheap and I keep piles of Taiwan dollars in a box next to my bed. All her friends are other expats teaching English. I mostly only talk to her.
We split a joint and walk out to the night market, where we tong leafy greens and meats into plastic bags and hand them to a man to whom she speaks in stumbling Mandarin. He boils all our food inside a pot, then tongs it back, still steaming, into our plastic bags. We walk, slurping our wet, hot food with chopsticks, and watch a tall, thin man charm a large black snake, beading eyes and shimmering skin; another has itself wrapped around his neck as he works. We pass booths of textiles, meats, and toys and buy loose-fitting linen skirts. One night, we go through a single purple curtain and she cheers and smiles and holds my hand as a small, stout woman pokes a needle through my eyebrow skin. I hold her hand as she gets the cartilage on top of each of her ears poked and filled with small studs and we get shaved ice with sweet fruit juice over the top. All around us words fly out but I can’t understand them. I like not having to parse their meaning; they add texture, engulf our daily life, but I’m not expected to respond. After our piercings and our shaved ice, she buys a third bottle of wine from a twenty-four-hour convenience store and we sit in a park late at night and talk and talk; I think this is exactly why I came. I like that no one looks at either of us. I’m so very relieved.
But she’s drunk all the time. She’s stoned from early in the morning, goes out with friends I don’t like. I stay in my room when they come over. They bring ketamine, Vicodin, and cocaine, other drugs that I don’t hear the names of, that I don’t stick around to see up close. I’ve had eleven different drugs prescribed to me by now and hated all of them. I’ve spent so much of the last ten years feeling out of control. I slip away with the large bag of bing cherries I’ve picked up at the fruit stand that day and curl up on my mattress on the floor and read.
I start running again in Taipei. I’ve run off and on since high school, but always dipping back into stretches of not leaving my apartment, never feeling strong the way it used to make me feel. But here, sometimes, the apartment’s too oppressive and I get lost for hours in the back alleys of the city, not knowing the language, not reading the street signs, but still somehow finding my way back. She writes our address in Mandarin on a business card and I carry it with me each time I go running. It gets sweaty in my shorts pocket and the writing bleeds, but I don’t ask her for a fresh one. I carry keys and cash and go for hours to be free of her talking and the air is hot and thick and the smog is visible in some places, but I do loops around the small park by our house and sprint through markets, people giving foot massages on the sidewalks. Sometimes old women sitting outside their small fruit stands cheer and I smile and take off.
* * *
The night she brings home a one night stand whose last name we’ll never learn, I’m in bed like that with my cherries and my book. Hotel du Lac: Edith banished to a hotel, on probation, after an aborted marriage. I wake up, a cherry pit stuck to my cheek, when they come in. I try not to listen as they stumble to her room. That morning, when I get up to go to work, her door is open and I see them; all day, instructing wealthy six- and seven-year-olds in simple grammar, I have an image of her on top of him, her bare chest and his.
* * *
It’s a weeknight, a little more than a month later, when she comes home with the first pregnancy test. I think at first that she is joking. I think, briefly, of that time she was twenty and I was nineteen. I wait, another bag of cherries on my lap, The West Wing still playing on the TV, still sweaty from my evening run, as she goes into the bathroom the first time. We walk back and forth from our apartment to the fluorescently lit convenience store a block away to buy more tests to double-check. I cut up mango, share my cherries, sit quietly on the couch as she goes back to check again.
* * *
We go to a doctor in Taipei and he asks us (he asks her, because I don’t speak the language) why we’re wasting his time; she will abort the baby, he tells us. Why are we there asking about prenatal vitamins and care? I’m not sure he’s wrong but don’t say this to her. In all the years since then, I’ve still never been sure why she decided to keep her. I can say that both of us had come to feel completely sapped of power. We were bored and anxious. Six years later, in that coffee shop, when I stared at the word “pregnant” and thought about my baby, I thought of her, of that angry, dismissive man. I think maybe she wanted someone to love and to love her. When I first think of her as a mother that night—so much of our friendship up until then had been her instructing, guiding, while I listened—I think, Of course.
We have a trip planned. For months now, we’ve been plotting our departure, two months across the region with all the money that we’ve saved, then heading home. We’ve pored over maps and scheduled planes and trains and buses. Our jobs have ended. She’s shocked but still we empty our apartment, sell most of our things and leave the rest for our landlord. We pack backpacks and take a flight from Taipei to Vietnam. The plane is small and smells of cigarettes and stale, cold air and she vomits off and on the whole time. She vomits on a bus to Sapa, at a night market in Ho Chi Minh City, in alleys, hostel bathrooms, restaurant napkins. She fights with a pedicab driver in Hanoi, who takes us for a two-hour ride outside the city that we haven’t asked for. By the time he lets us out—still far from our hostel, late at night, and lost—she’s screaming at him and he’s refusing to let go of her arm. She’s frantic and s
he’s angry, but I think then that knowing how to fight might be one of the most important parts of what’s about to happen to her, and I feel briefly less afraid.
That night, I take her luggage and mine and leave her at an internet café. I go into what looks like the fanciest hotel within walking distance and put a night on my (parents’) credit card. I’ve been without my parents’ money a couple of years already, living off my stipends and waiting tables three nights a week in New York, but they sent me a credit card before I left. I’ll cut it up soon after this. But this night, I buy her tonic water (the only thing that she can keep down) and Western potato chips and, once I’ve brought her to the hotel, I run her a warm bath. We watch TV and sit up in the warm, soft bed together and for one of the first times maybe since I met her, we don’t talk at all.
When she decides, a few days later, in a hostel in Cambodia, to go home, she expects me to go with her. We call her sister, who, whatever I think or say about her over all these years, is there for her, both before and after, in ways that I am not. We start to plan. The whole time we talk as if I’ll come with her. Right before we call the airline, though, I realize that I won’t. This is maybe more agency than I’ve ever had in front of her, perhaps the first time I’ve chosen to be separate from her since we met. I can’t fathom right up to the point when I say so that I might choose it. I feel both scared and impossibly relieved once I do.
We’re in a hostel phone booth in Phnom Penh as I tell her I’m not going with her and she sits and I stand and watch her fingers clutch the old, black phone and I watch pedicabs fly past her out the window, hoping maybe I’ll just disappear.
I’m going to stay, I think, I say.
I can see her shoulders still, her flat, scared face. I feel emptied out and free all of a sudden. For weeks I’ve been trying to help her, somehow fix this or make it better. All this time I wanted her to need me, but I can’t give to her whatever she needs now. I sit with her as she calls the airline. She’s spent more money than me. For weeks before we left, I doled out more and more of the cash I kept by my bed, and we kept a tally on the fridge of what she owed. She spent so much more on weed and evenings out, and I paid most of our rent.
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