Fresh Complaint

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Yeah, and look how that turned out, Prakrti thought. But she said nothing. Discussing the idea would only dignify it, when what she wanted was to make it go away. Her mother was prone to wild imaginings. She was always dreaming of moving back to India after Prakrti’s dad retired. She fantasized about Prakrti’s getting a job there someday, in Bangalore or Mumbai, of her marrying an Indian boy and buying a house big enough to accommodate her parents. Dev Kumar was just the latest form this fantasy had taken.

  Prakrti put on her headphones to block her mother out. She spent the rest of the flight writing her essay on The Scarlet Letter.

  After they got back home, just as she hoped, the nightmare scenario went away. Her mother brought up Dev a few times, in a scripted, promotional way, but then let the subject drop. Her father, back at work, seemed to have forgotten the Kumars entirely. As for Prakrti, she re-immersed herself in schoolwork. She studied late every night, traveled with the debate team, and, on Saturday mornings, attended SAT prep sessions at her school.

  One weekend, in December, she was in her bedroom, Facetiming with Kylie while they did their homework. Prakrti had her phone in bed next to her, Kylie’s voice coming from the speaker.

  “So, anyway,” Kylie said, “he comes to my house and leaves all these flowers on the front porch.”

  “Ziad?”

  “Yeah. He leaves them right there. Like grocery-store flowers. But a lot of them. And then my mom and dad and my little brother come home and find them. It was so embarrassing. Hold on. He just texted me.”

  While she waited for Kylie to read the text, Prakrti said, “You should break up with him. He’s immature, he can’t spell, and—I’m sorry but—he’s large.”

  When her phone pinged a moment later, Prakrti thought Kylie had forwarded the new text from Ziad, so they could discuss it and decide what to write back. She opened the text without looking at the sender, and the screen of her phone filled with the face of Dev Kumar.

  She knew it was him by his pained, overeager expression. Dev stood—or had been posed, most likely—in flattering light before the convoluted limbs of a banyan tree. He was skinny in a developing-world way, as though deprived of protein as a child. Her cousin Rajiv and his friends dressed the way boys at Prakrti’s school did, maybe a bit better. They wore the same brands and had the same haircuts. By comparison, Dev was wearing a white shirt with absurdly large seventies-style lapels and ill-fitting gray pants. His smile was crooked and his black hair shiny with oil.

  Normally Prakrti would have shared the photo with Kylie. Selfies of guys who were trying too hard, guys who sent chest pics or used filters, were normally guaranteed to send them into fits of laughter. But that night Prakrti clicked her phone shut and put it down. She didn’t want to explain who Dev was. She was too embarrassed.

  Neither, in the passing days, did she tell her Indian friends. A lot of them had parents whose own marriages had been arranged, and so were used to hearing the practice defended at home. Some parents advanced the superiority of arranged marriages by citing the low divorce rate in India. Mr. Mehta, Devi Mehta’s dad, liked to bring up a “scientific” study in Psychology Today, which concluded that people in love marriages were more in love during the first five years of marriage whereas people in arranged marriages were more in love after thirty years of marriage. Love flowered from shared experiences was the message. It was a reward rather than a gift.

  Parents had to say this, of course. To do otherwise would be to invalidate their own unions. But it was all an act. They knew things were different in America.

  Except that sometimes they weren’t. There was a group of girls at Prakrti’s school who came from super-conservative families, girls who’d been born in India themselves, and partly raised there, and who, as a consequence, were totally submissive. Though these girls spoke perfect English in class, and wrote essays in a strange, beautiful, almost Victorian style, among themselves they preferred to speak Hindi, or Gujarati, or whatever. They never ate cafeteria food or used the vending machines but brought their own vegetarian lunches, packed in tiffins. These girls weren’t allowed to attend school dances or to join after-school clubs that had boys as members. They came to school every day and quietly, dutifully did their work, and, after the last bell sounded, they trooped out to Kia sedans and Honda minivans to be returned to their quarantined existence. There was a rumor that these girls, protective of their hymens, wouldn’t use Tampax. That inspired the nickname Prakrti and her friends had for them. The Hymens, they called them. Look, here come the Hymens.

  “I don’t know why I like him,” Kylie said. “We used to have this Newfoundland, Bartleby. Ziad sort of reminds me of him.”

  “What?”

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  “Sorry,” Prakrti said. “Yeah, no. Those dogs are gross. They drool.”

  She deleted the photo.

  * * *

  “So now you’re giving out my number to random guys?” Prakrti said to her mother, the next day.

  “Did you get the picture from Dev? His mother promised to make him send one.”

  “You say never to give my number to strangers and now you’re giving it out?”

  “Dev is hardly ‘random.’”

  “He is to me.”

  “Let me take a picture of you to send back. I promised Mrs. Kumar.”

  “No.”

  “Come on. Don’t look so gloomy. Dev will think you have a terrible disposition. Smile, Prakrti. Do I have to force you to smile?”

  * * *

  Why don’t you just sign my body?

  At dinner, in a restaurant near campus, while making conversation with members of the lecture committee, Matthew kept hearing the girl’s words in his head.

  Did she mean what she said? Or was it just the kind of dumb, provocative statement American college girls made nowadays? Equivalent to the way they danced, bumping and grinding, twerking, sending out messages that were unintentional. If Matthew were younger, if he were remotely the same age, maybe he’d know the answer.

  The restaurant was nicer than he’d expected. A woody, farm-to-table place, with a warm interior. They’d been given a room off the bar, Matthew seated, importantly, at the center of the table.

  The woman next to him, a philosophy professor in her thirties with frizzy hair, a broad face, and a pugnacious manner, said to Matthew, “Here’s my cosmology question. If we accept an infinite multiverse, and the existence of every conceivable kind of universe, then there has to be a universe in which God exists and one in which He—I mean, She—doesn’t. Along with every other kind of universe. So, which one are we living in?”

  “Fortunately, one that has alcohol,” Matthew said, raising his glass.

  “Is there a universe where I have hair?” said a bald, bearded economist two seats away.

  The conversation went on like that, quick, jovial. People peppered Matthew with questions. Whenever he opened his mouth to answer, the table fell silent. The questions had nothing to do with his talk, which had already faded from their minds, but were about other topics: space aliens, or the Higgs boson. The only other physicist there, possibly resentful of Matthew’s relative success, didn’t say a word. On the walk over to the restaurant, he had told Matthew, “Your blog is popular with my undergrads. The kids love it.”

  After the main course, while the dishes were being cleared away, the chair of the committee instructed the people sitting closest to Matthew to switch seats with those farther away. Everyone ordered pudding, but when the waiter came to him, Matthew asked for a whiskey. The drink had just arrived when his phone vibrated in his pocket.

  The new person who sat down next to Matthew was a birdlike woman with pale skin, dressed in a pantsuit. “I’m not a professor,” she said. “I’m Pete’s wife.” She pointed to her husband across the table.

  Matthew took his phone from his pocket and held it discreetly below the table.

  He didn’t recognize the number. The message was simple: �
��hi.”

  Returning the phone to his pocket, he took a sip of whiskey. He leaned back and gazed around the restaurant. He’d reached the stage of the evening—of evenings like this on the road—when a rosiness came over things, a slow, flavorful, oozing light invading the restaurant almost like a liquid. The rosiness came from the glow of the bar with its rows of colorful bottles stacked on mirrored shelves, but also from the wall sconces and candlelight reflecting on the plateglass windows etched in gold. The rosiness was part of the hum of the restaurant, the sounds of people talking and laughing, convivial, city sounds, but it was also part of Matthew himself, a rising sense of contentment at being who and where he was, free to get up to whatever mischief presented itself. On top of it all, this rosiness had to do with his knowledge of the single word—hi—that lay hidden in the cell phone tucked in his pocket snug against his thigh.

  This rosiness wouldn’t survive on its own. It needed Matthew’s participation. Before excusing himself, he ordered another whiskey. Then he stood up, gaining his balance, and walked through the bar to the stairs that led down to the lavatory.

  The men’s room was empty. Music, which may have been playing upstairs in the loud restaurant, was pumping from high-fidelity speakers in the ceiling. It sounded surprisingly good in the tiled space, and Matthew moved to the beat as he entered a toilet stall and closed the door behind him. He took out his phone and began typing with one finger.

  The response was almost immediate.

  Matthew hesitated. Then he wrote:

  It was like skiing. Like the moment when, at the summit, you first lean downhill and gravity takes hold, sending you flying. For the next few minutes, as they texted back and forth, Matthew was only half aware of the person he was communicating with. The two images he had of the girl—one in the baggy sweatshirt, the other in the tight white top—were hard to reconcile. He couldn’t remember exactly what she looked like anymore. The girl was specific enough yet vague enough to be any woman, or all women. Each text Matthew sent generated a thrilling reply, and as his tone escalated in flirtatiousness, the girl matched him. The excitement of hurling impetuous thoughts into the void was intoxicating.

  Now ellipses appeared: the girl was typing something. Matthew stared at his screen, waiting. He could feel the girl at the other end of the invisible pathway connecting them, her head lowered, her black hair falling over her face as it had at the book table, while she worked the keys with her nimble thumbs.

  And then her response appeared:

  Matthew hadn’t seen that coming. It sobered him up at once. For a moment he saw himself for what he was, a middle-aged, married man and father, hiding in a bathroom stall, texting a girl less than half his age.

  There was only one honorable response.

  Ellipses appeared again. Then vanished. Did not reappear.

  Matthew waited a few more minutes before exiting the stall. Seeing his reflection in the mirror, he grimaced and cried out, “Pathetic!”

  But he didn’t feel that way. Not really. On the whole, he felt rather proud of himself, as if he’d failed while attempting a spectacular play in a sporting contest.

  He was climbing the stairs back to the restaurant when his phone went off again.

  * * *

  On the dresser in the master bedroom stood a wedding portrait. In garish color, it showed the boy and girl who would become Prakrti’s parents standing solemnly beside each other, as though prodded into position by a goad. Atop her father’s impossibly slender face sat a white turban. A diadem depended from her mother’s smooth forehead, its gold chain matching the ring in her nose and shadowed by the veil of red lace that covered her hair. Both their necks were draped with heavy necklaces made of multiple strings of shining, dark red berries. Or maybe they were too hard to be berries. Maybe they were seeds.

  On the day the photograph was taken, her parents had known each other for twenty-four hours.

  Most of the time, Prakrti didn’t think about her parents’ wedding. It had happened long ago, in another country, under different rules. But every now and then, compelled by outrage as much as curiosity, she forced herself to imagine the events immediately following the taking of that photo. A dark, provisionary hotel room somewhere, and, standing in the middle of it, her seventeen-year-old mother. A naïve village girl who knew next to nothing about sex, or guys, or birth control, and yet who knew what was required of her in that particular moment. Understood that it was her duty to take off her clothes in front of a man no less a stranger than someone she passed on the street. To remove her wedding sari, her satin slippers, her hand-sewn underclothes, her gold bangles and necklaces, and to lie on her back and let him do what he wanted. To submit. To an accounting student who shared an apartment, in Newark, New Jersey, with six other bachelors, his breath still smelling of the American fast food he’d wolfed down before getting on the plane to fly to India.

  Prakrti couldn’t reconcile the scandal of this arrangement—it was almost prostitution—with the prim, autocratic mother she knew. Most probably, it hadn’t happened like that at all, she decided. No, more likely nothing had gone on in the first weeks or months of her parents’ marriage but only much later, once they’d gotten to know each other and any hint of compulsion or violation had disappeared. Prakrti would never know the truth. She was too scared to ask.

  She went online to find other people in her situation. As usual with the Internet, it took only a few searches to locate message boards teeming with complaints, advice, rationalizations, cries for help, and expressions of comfort. Some women, usually educated and living in cities, treated the subject of arranged marriage with theatrical alarm, as though they were living out a zany episode of The Mindy Project. They depicted their parents as well-meaning people whose meddlesomeness, however infuriating, never kept them from being loveable. “So my mom keeps giving out my e-mail to people she meets. The other day I get this e-mail from some guy’s dad and he starts asking all these personal questions, like how much do I weigh and do I smoke or take drugs and are there any health or gynecological issues he should know about, in order to see if I’m marriage material for his lame son who I wouldn’t even hook up with if we were both at Burning Man on molly and I was feeling generous and/or horny.” Other women seemed resigned to parental pressure and scheming. “I mean, seriously,” one person wrote, “is it any worse than joining OkCupid? Or having some guy in a bar blow his boozy breath in your face all night?”

  But there were heartbreaking posts, too, from girls closer to Prakrti’s age. Girls who didn’t write that well and who maybe went to bad schools or who hadn’t lived in the States long. There was one post, from a girl whose username was “Brokenbylife,” that Prakrti couldn’t get out of her head. “Hi, I live in Arkansas. It’s illegal here to get married at my age (I’m 15) unless you have parental consent. The problem is my dad wants me to marry this friend of his from India. I haven’t even met him. I asked to see a photo but the one my dad showed me was of a guy way too young to be a friend of his (my dad’s 56). So it’s like I’m being catfished by my own father. Can anyone help me? Is there some kind of legal aid I can contact? What can you do if you’re young and don’t consent but are too scared to go against your parents because of past issues with verbal/physical abuse?”

  After spending a few hours on the Internet reading stuff like that, Prakrti was frantic. It made everything realer. What she’d thought lunacy was everywhere being put into practice, fought against, or given in to.

  * * *

  From Dorset Matthew takes the train to London, and then another to Heathrow. Two hours later, he’s in the air, heading to JFK. He’s chosen a window seat so he won’t be disturbed during the flight. Looking out the window, he sees the wing of the jet, the large, cylindrical, dirty-looking jet engine. He imagines opening the emergency door and walking out on the wing, balancing himself against the force of the wind, and for a moment it almost seems plausible.

  In the four months he’s been in England,
he has kept in touch with his children mainly by text. They don’t like e-mail. Too slow, they say. Skype, their preference, disorients Matthew. The streaming images of Jacob and Hazel that appear on his laptop render them simultaneously within reach and irreclaimable. Jacob’s face looks fatter. He gets distracted and frequently looks away, possibly at another screen. Hazel pays her father undivided attention. Leaning forward, she holds a fistful of hair close to the camera to show off her new highlights, which she’s dyed red, or purple, or blue. Often the screen freezes, however, pixelating his children’s faces and making them seem constructed, illusory.

  Matthew is unnerved, too, by his own image as it pops up in a window at the corner of the screen. There he is, their shadowy dad, in his hideout.

  All his attempts at joviality sound false in his ears.

  There’s no winning: if his children seem traumatized by his absence, it’s terrible; if they seem distant and self-reliant, it’s just as bad. The familiar details of their bedrooms stab Matthew in the heart, the flocked wallpaper in Hazel’s room, Jacob’s hockey posters.

  The children sense that their lives have become precarious. They have overheard Tracy speaking with Matthew on the phone, with her family and friends, with her lawyer. The children ask Matthew if he and their mother are getting divorced, and he tells them, honestly, that he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if they will be a family again.

  More than anything, what astounds him now is his stupidity. He’d thought his cheating only involved Tracy. Had believed that the trust he was breaking was with her alone; and that his deceit was mitigated, if not excused, by the travails of marriage, the resentments, the physical dissatisfactions. He’d careened out of control, with Jacob and Hazel in the backseat, and thought they couldn’t be injured.

  Occasionally, during Skype calls, Tracy blunders into the room. Realizing whom Jacob or Hazel is speaking to, she calls out a greeting to Matthew in a strained, forgiving voice. But she stays back, careful not to show her face. Or to see his.