“Sure,” he said. “It’s up to you. I just won’t feel like dressing up.”
“Right.” She found herself saying it flatly and quickly, but he didn’t seem to notice. So she went on. “Sometimes girls like getting dressed up.”
He laughed. “Okay. Boys like to wear jeans.”
“My student is here.” She wasn’t. “We’ll talk later.” She hung up.
The problem, the source of all her snippiness, her cattiness, her being such a girl about everything, was that since they’d gotten engaged nine months ago he had not once, not a single time except during sex, which absolutely didn’t count, called her beautiful. In sharp contrast to the courtship phase, when he’d say it several times a week, one way or another. She’d known the staring-into-her-eyes thing wasn’t going to last forever, and it had been a crazy year, with the Australia trip and his dissertation, but nine months and nothing. Not that she was counting, but she was. She’d have settled for a peck on the head and “Hey, gorgeous.” A whistle when she stepped out of the shower.
She’d been so caught up in being engaged and close to tenure and publishing her articles and generally getting everything she wanted that it wasn’t until those weeks in the Adelaide hotel, alone with Australian TV and her own thoughts, that she started wondering if she could live with Malcolm the rest of her life, never seeing beauty reflected back at her. And she wondered, if she felt like this now, how she’d feel at nine months pregnant. Or fifty years old. Or terminally ill.
It was regressive and petty and uneducated to care about beauty, but she did. God help her, it was closely tied to her self-esteem and probably had been since about fourth grade.
Here was Eden, arriving like a prophecy, knocking with one knuckle on the open office door. Alex motioned her in. Eden’s eyes had that jet-lagged glaze common to all the foreign students. Every year Alex assumed it would wear off by October, but it never did. She’d mentioned it once to Leonard, and of course he’d had a theory. “You know why, right? They stay up all night texting their friends back home. Refuse to adjust to American time.”
Eden sat on the edge of the chair, red backpack on her lap. It almost reached her chin—a canvas shield. “Eden, I just want to touch base with you.” No response. “You’ve been getting solid A’s on your papers, but I need you to understand that twenty percent of your final grade is class participation.”
“Okay.” She said it through her hair, barely audible. If it hadn’t been a cultural issue, Alex would have worried about depression.
“Do you feel you are participating?”
She shrugged.
“Hello? Do you?” Which was harsh. She was mad at Malcolm, not this poor girl.
Eden shrugged again. “What else could I do?” It was the most words Alex had ever heard her string together, and she was pleased to note that the English was okay. When she’d been a TA, another TA actually told her to compare foreign students’ spoken English with their written English, to make sure they weren’t plagiarizing. The implication being that they were more likely than native speakers to do so. Alex had never seen this borne out.
“There’s nothing else you can do,” she said to Eden. “You need to talk.”
“Okay.”
“Look, I understand that back in Korea you weren’t supposed to talk in class, but you’re at an American university now, and part of an American education is the exchange of ideas. Not just writing about literature, but engaging. Out loud.” She always had trouble ending conversations with students, especially ones who wouldn’t look her in the eye. “Is that something you think you can do?”
Eden shrugged and nodded, but she seemed upset, staring at the bookshelf behind Alex. She looked, for once, like she wanted to say something. But she didn’t; she just stood up and left.
Alex did take Malcolm someplace nice: Silver Plum, a twenty-minute drive from home. She overdressed, in a sheer green blouse and a silk skirt, knowing he wouldn’t say anything about it at all. It was like she was daring him not to.
He was exhausted. He wore khakis and a wrinkled blue polo shirt, and he was overdue for a haircut, curls everywhere. He ordered a scotch and gulped it down. He didn’t want to talk about his dissertation, or Chicago, or work. She didn’t even try to bring up the plans for the wedding in May, which he’d probably have talked about, but the thought was starting to make her sick. Specifically: the fact that either, after months of preparations, he’d see her in her dress and say nothing at all, or he’d say something nice and she’d suspect it was out of duty.
“I finally met Jansen’s wife,” he said. Jansen was his adviser, and apparently something of a god in the world of sociolinguistics.
“Yeah? What’s she like?”
“Beautiful. She’s just this gorgeous, sixty-whatever woman with enormous black eyes.”
“Huh.”
“I mean, they’re like pools of blackness.”
“Huh.”
“Not what I expected, you know? I thought she’d be some little mousy person. And she’s just this amazing, exuberant, stunning woman.”
Winded from the effort of that much conversation, he returned to his lasagna.
Alex caught her reflection in the window to the street, and for the love of God she looked like a circus clown, all frizz and eyes and jawbone. It was a wonder he could look at her at all. But people had found her beautiful, they really had, and one of the reasons she’d even landed on her specialty (vain creature that she was) was that Donna Edwards, her college professor for Nineteenth Century British Poetry, saw her that first day of the term and said, “You—you’re a ringer for Jane Morris!” The next day, she brought in a book with Rossetti’s Proserpine and proved it to everyone.
She wanted to grab Malcolm by the collar with one hand and say, “People would have painted me. If I’d lived in the right century, they would have paid me just to sit there!” But with the other hand she wanted to scratch out her face with a marker or a knife, obliterate every trace of ugliness, of gawky eighth grader, of hope.
Some feminist.
That Friday it wasn’t even Leonard who called her in, but Miriam Kohn, the dean of faculty. Alex was offered a glass of water, asked to take a seat on the soft leather couch. She wanted to compare the experience to being called to the principal’s office, but that had never happened to her.
“So we received a letter from a student named Eden Su,” Miriam said. She had nothing on her desk, nothing at all except her picture frames and her closed computer, and she rested her hands in her lap. “It was a request to drop your class.”
“I think I know what this is about,” Alex said. It had been one of about ten scenarios she’d rehearsed since receiving Miriam’s e-mail, and she felt her best strategy was to turn this into a friendly debate about how hard to push foreign students, and whether the class participation component was out of order.
“I’m not sure you do. Tell me what you know about Miss Su.”
“She does seem borderline depressed to me, although I question whether that’s cultural, just a matter of reserve. She’s not an English major.” Miriam was staring at her, so she kept talking. “I believe she’s a sophomore. Very good writer.”
“Yes, her writing is excellent. Tell me something: You mentioned a cultural issue. What did you mean by that?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t call it an issue. She’s just very quiet, and I’m sure that’s what the letter is about, that I asked her to speak more in class. I did acknowledge that in her previous schooling she likely hadn’t been asked to speak much. I hope that didn’t upset her.”
Miriam opened a desk drawer and pulled out a paper. It wasn’t folded—so it was a Xerox of the letter, and who knew how many copies were out there, and why. Miriam glanced through it. “In this exchange, did you refer to her schooling in Korea?”
“Right.” And then her stomach turned to a wave of acid.
Miriam had asked it so casually, but no, this was the whole point. “Oh God, is she not—”
“No, she’s not. She’s from Minnesota, fifth-generation American. And her ethnic background is Chinese.”
Alex stared stupidly forward. Could she really have mistaken a whispered Minnesotan accent for a Korean one? She started to explain that Eden never spoke, that she looked so jet-lagged, but she stopped herself. It might only make things worse. She put her hand to her mouth to show that she was properly horrified, that she felt terrible on behalf of the girl. When really all she felt was horrified for herself.
Miriam looked at the letter again. “The issue, you understand, is the presumption that a student who looks Asian must be foreign-born. She’s quite angry, and it seems she’s involved the Minority Student Council. She says her father is upset, but we haven’t heard from him yet.”
“Can I ask why Leonard isn’t handling this, on a departmental level?”
“He felt uncomfortable with the situation.” He probably didn’t even understand what the issue was. She’d heard the man use the word oriental on multiple occasions.
“May I please see the letter?” Alex held out her hand.
“Not at the moment, no, I’m afraid not.” Miriam slid it back in the desk drawer. “But you’ll see it soon. And I want you to know that I do understand how we make assumptions about all our students—background, socioeconomic status. If it were up to me, it would end with this conversation.”
Alex didn’t know what to do, and she realized some principal’s office experience would have come in handy. Did one grovel now? Burst into tears? Make a joke? It was hot, so she rolled up her sleeves. In the office of the South Australian Parks Department, she’d just told her story again and again while they plied her with tea and cookies and tried to ensure she maintained a pleasant impression of Australia despite the legal trouble. A cookie might have been nice right now.
“What’s going to happen next is that the dean of students will recommend Miss Su take this to the Grievance Committee, and you’ll just have to do a written statement. I predict that they’ll discuss this briefly and dismiss it. And if there’s no disciplinary action, it won’t come up in your tenure review. That’s my very strong prediction.”
On the way to her car, she called Malcolm and canceled dinner, saying she had a monstrous headache and ten calls to make. She’d just have seethed silently, and she couldn’t bear his asking what was wrong, trying to guess if it was something he’d said or done.
Usually, it was.
That night she drank an entire bottle of red wine, played A Night at the Opera with the sound too low to hear, and attempted to catalog any potentially racist thoughts she’d ever entertained. When she was five, walking in Boston, she’d grabbed her mother’s hand because there was a black man coming toward them on the sidewalk. But she was so young, and she’d grown up in New Hampshire, for Christ’s sake.
More recently, she hated the way any NPR reporter using Spanish words would roll out the thickest accent possible, just to prove to his boss and the listening public that ten years of Spanish classes had paid off and he was down with the people. “It’s going to be a big issue with Ell-a-diiii-no voters,” for instance. In a way he’d never refer to “the Français community” or “Deutsch immigrants.”
And there was a journalism professor, Mary Gardner, whose creamy brown skin Alex once stared at in a faculty forum, becoming (profoundly, inexcusably) hungry for chocolate.
But that was it. Honest to God, that was it. A resentment of overzealous reporters, a perverse admiration of Mary Gardner’s complexion, a small child’s ignorance.
She hadn’t even been around much overt racism. Once, in college, a girl on her freshman hall had said, “If everyone in Asia is, like, lactose intolerant, then how do they feed their babies? Is that why they’re all so skinny?”
It occurred to Alex, lying drunk on the couch, that if all she could summon up was one incident of someone else’s racism, while she could pin three on herself—no, four, let’s not forget the big one—that made her the most racist person she knew. By 300 percent.
Malcolm called at nine to see how she was, but she was too drunk to pick up. He called on Saturday morning, when she was too hungover, and again on Sunday night, when she was once again too drunk. He didn’t seem terribly concerned about her absence, not even in the Sunday message. “Just checking in,” he said. “Call me later.”
She passed herself in the mirror late that night, and the gin and the bathroom lighting made her look somehow speckled, like a grainy photograph. She gripped the sink edge and squinted, to see how she’d look to a stranger. Interesting, maybe. Striking. From a certain angle, ugly, and from a certain angle, not.
Sometime after midnight, she called Malcolm’s cell phone, knowing it would be turned off. She said, slowly, trying to enunciate, “Just checking in. I want you to know, Malcolm, that I cannot live the rest of my life being ugly. You need to know that. That is all.”
She drank three glasses of water and passed out.
On Monday, Eden wasn’t in class. Why this should have been a surprise, Alex had no idea. Was she expecting her to show up obediently until the registrar came through with official permission for the late drop? Did she, on some level, think this because she expected Asians to be more mindful of authority? No, no, no, she was just hungover still, from the whole long, miserable weekend, and the coffee had only made things worse. Let’s be honest: She was still drunk. She thought she might be missing a couple of other Asian students, too, and the fact that she wasn’t sure was a very bad sign.
“‘Tintern Abbey,’” she said, and found she had nothing else to add. “Let’s read it aloud.”
She ended class fifteen minutes early, threw up in the bathroom on the second floor, bought a cheeseburger from the co-op to absorb some of the alcohol, and went back up to put her head on her desk until her afternoon class.
She woke to the ring of her office phone reverberating through the desk, a hundred times louder than it should have been. It was Malcolm.
“Your cell’s off,” he said. Really, she had no idea where it was. “So you were pretty drunk last night.” He was laughing. “What were you drinking?”
“All of it.”
“Everything okay?”
“You mean this morning? Yeah.” She turned down openings like this all the time. Because what could she possibly say? Asking if he still found her attractive was desperate and unattractive. Telling him he needed to compliment her was worse. In either case, she’d never believe anything nice he said, ever again. She realized that what she was supposed to be upset about was Eden Su. That should have been what she was working up the nerve to tell him. But it had come down to this: After twenty-two years of schooling and eight years of slogging away at her CV, she somehow cared more about her appearance than her career.
“So what’s new?” he said.
And she said, “I don’t think I can marry you.”
Bill Tossman found her on a bench outside the library, trying not to vomit again. She was sitting very, very still, hands clasped around a paper cup of coffee she didn’t think it wise to drink. “There she sits,” he said, “‘as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.’” She tried to laugh or smile, but it must have come out a grimace.
“I have something for you.” He sat beside her, shaking the bench just enough to make her head throb and stomach slosh. He was a big man. Long limbs and a smooth, bright face, a soft gut that aged him. He had a crush on her. Or at least he’d always been sweet to her. She wasn’t sure she could trust her judgment anymore. Tossman was a poet, the one department member with a Pulitzer instead of a PhD. It made his loud voice all the more surreal.
He slipped his hand into his briefcase pocket, pulled out a rubber-banded pack of playing cards, and shuffled them on his knee. “Cut,” he said, and she managed to. He took four car
ds off the top and laid them facedown on the bench. “Okay,” he said, “flip them up.”
Seven of diamonds. Seven of hearts. Seven of clubs. Seven of spades.
“See? Your luck is turning!” He laughed, proud of himself.
“Where’d you learn that?”
“Where’d I learn what?”
He was making her feel like his niece, and although it was sweet, she didn’t appreciate it. On a professional level. She gathered the cards and held them out to him, but he shook his head. “Why don’t you hang onto those? And hey, I’m sorry about the whole letter thing. That shouldn’t have happened. It wasn’t necessary.”
She stared, trying to comprehend. He wasn’t on the Grievance Committee.
“In the paper.”
“The paper?”
“Oh. Christ. You’ve seen it, yes? In the Campus Telegraph. I should—there’s a stack in the library, if you want to—okay. Hey, I’m going to run before I make more of a jackass. Look, come by if you need to talk.” He literally backed away from her—went backward a good ten steps, then stopped. “It’s not like I don’t know about messing up, right?” He laughed at himself and walked on, hitting his briefcase against his leg. He must have meant his marriage ending last year, and then the time he broke down sobbing in front of his Frost seminar when they discussed images of adultery in “The Silken Tent.”
Alex held her head a few more seconds, then pushed herself up.
The “open letter” in the Telegraph wasn’t from Eden herself, but from the entire Minority Student Council. It named Alex, described her conversation with Eden pretty accurately, and went on to include “ten stereotypes about Asian-American students”—number eight was “Asian-American students are more likely to cheat to attain high grades”—and a quote from Leonard, stating that “the English Department works hard to include everyone.”
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