by Neel Patel
I’m not sure what it was. I don’t know when it disappeared: the will. I suspect it had something to do with love, but what exactly? Before Eun-ji, I was dedicated, diligent, never missing a day of class. I was so engrossed in my studies that I hardly noticed her sitting in front of me each day. Then one day, I did. It was like a light flicked on inside of me. Instead of listening to the lecturer I would imagine the two of us on a beach, at a cocktail party, or a hospital even, Eun-ji delivering our firstborn. It was maddening.
When I returned to school, the campus was blanketed in snow; the trees were stripped bare. The radiator was broken in my apartment, so I spent my evenings wrapped up in a comforter, drinking Jim Beam. Our classes resumed, but I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing Eun-ji freshly tanned from St. Lucia, talking to her friends. So I stayed home.
I started tracking her on Facebook again. On Monday she was at the gym. On Wednesday she was at a café. On Friday she went out with her friends, posting pictures of herself from a bar. There she was in a black tube top, gold glitter on her eyes. There was a man standing next to her.
He was tagged.
* * *
His name was Michael Gray. He was a law student (I knew this because I had clicked on his page). He was political, posting links to various injustices happening all over the world. Sometimes he posted a gif of a cat, or a snapshot of the American flag. He was opinionated, arguing passionately against the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize gay marriage, going on to say that there were more important things to worry about than the rights of gays. Much of his news feed consisted of articles on immigration and health care and guns. He seemed like the sort of white guy who was passively racist, which made his interest in Eun-ji all the more confusing. Once, he commented on a video of a black man being gunned down by the cops: “How are we supposed to believe he wasn’t armed?”
He was pompous—his page was plastered with pictures of his bulging muscles, his varnished face, his collection of watches and neckties and shoes. He wore his ash blond hair cropped close to his scalp, which was pink in the summertime, glistening like a piece of cooked Spam. I switched off my computer and passed out in my bed.
The next morning, there was another picture: he and Eun-ji were holding hands outside an IHOP. I looked at others, dating back to high school. There they were on a beach, on a swing, in Prague, on a cobblestone road. There were comments, glorious comments filling up the spaces beneath it, posted by family members and friends. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I called her on the phone. “Who is he?”
“Huh?”
It was dawn; soft light slinked in through the blinds. Eun-ji was sleepy, yawning into the receiver.
“Who, Eun-ji?”
She was silent.
“Answer me.”
Nothing.
“Were you fucking him the whole time?”
She hung up the phone.
I called three more times; she didn’t answer. I sent text messages; she didn’t reply. I wrote a three-page email outlining our entire relationship—the lows and the highs—then I walked to class. The wind was like a cold slap against my face. The frost bit into my fingers. The sharp air sliced through my lungs. Classes were canceled so I walked back home, removing my scarf and my shoes, my jacket limp with snow. Outside, students scraped windshields and laughed. A fat woman slipped on the ice. A salt truck rumbled past my window. I opened my laptop and found a message on Facebook. It was from Michael Gray. It said, “Hey, loser. Leave my girlfriend alone.”
* * *
The words pinged in my mind for hours. Hey, loser. I heard them while washing my hair, or making a sandwich, or reading a novel. I heard them after the first beer and the second beer and the third. Ping! Ping! Ping! Finally, I opened my laptop and replied.
I checked in the morning to see if he had responded, and later in the afternoon. Nothing. The blizzard cleared. The sidewalks emerged. Melted snow rushed through the metal grates in the road. Classes resumed and my professor emailed me, asking me where I was. I said I had the flu. In a way, I did.
I awoke two days later, feeling renewed. I walked into class with an extra bounce in my step. I took a seat in the first row and opened my textbook to the first page, when I felt Eun-ji’s presence behind me, staring at the back of my head.
* * *
My grades improved. I passed one test and then another, asking questions after class, spending hours in the medical library poring over my notes. On weekends I discussed hospital politics over a pint of beer. Sometimes Eun-ji would be there, stealing glances in my direction. She stopped being a presence in my mind. It was funny how love could do that: plant roots in your heart like a tenant who won’t leave and then, just like that, they’re gone.
Then one morning, she tapped me on my shoulder.
“Hey.”
She had gained some weight. Her thighs swelled in her jeans. She asked me if I wanted to grab a coffee, but I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Because it isn’t.”
There was panic in her eyes. She stormed out of the room. The next morning, I took my seat in the front of class and opened my notebook to a fresh page. I felt her eyes on the back of my head. After class was over, she hurried to catch up to me, but I quickened my pace. It went on like that for a while. I watched her squirm. Every now and then, I caught her frowning at the chalkboard ahead, looking miserable. Soon, she started dressing up as if for my benefit—short skirts and cropped blouses that stretched over the swell of her breasts. She wore more makeup than I preferred. Sometimes she showed up at parties and flirted loudly with other boys. Once, she caught up to me just as I was walking into Anatomy lab, grabbing me by the shoulder, asking me again.
This time I said yes.
* * *
“I thought Michael and I could work,” she said. “I needed to give it time.”
“And now?”
“And now it’s done.”
We made love in her bed, on her desk, in the library, after studying for an exam. Her breasts were like pillows of dough and her ass was like a mold of gelatin, wiggling with each step. I grabbed each part as if it were my own. Winter turned to spring. Torrential rains pelted the earth. These were the best moments, when we lay in bed listening to the persistent crackle of a storm. Sometimes we stared at the blurred lights outside her window and it was like we were the only two people in the world. For spring break, Eun-ji invited me to her parents’ time-share in Aruba. We spent the entire weekend baking in the sun.
I started keeping things at her place—razors and combs, underwear and socks, the tattered novels I read from time to time. The printed pictures of our trip to Aruba, which I had posted on Facebook already, so that everyone would know. Once, after an exam, we went to a bar. It was our first shelf of the year. Everyone was wired. Eun-ji was wearing a strapless black dress. Her arms were tanned apart from the pale imprints her bathing suit had left behind. We were fresh from lovemaking, ordering drinks at the bar, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I spun around.
I hadn’t expected to see him in person; the law campus was nowhere near ours—though we shared the same bars, the same dorms, the same restaurants smoky with lamb kebabs, the same stretch of green pasture that connected the graduate campus to the undergraduate one. I remembered the message I’d sent him months ago—Fuck you, motherfucker—and felt the urge to laugh. Michael brought his face close to mine, revealing a jagged white smile.
“Got a problem?”
He was massive—a few inches taller than me and wider, too, with strong shoulders and thick arms. His skin was the color of a ripe tomato. His eyes flashed sharply like the tip of a blade.
“No,” I said, feeling the weight of his grip. “Not at all.”
He laughed, pushing me against the bar. I fell backward. He pushed me again. I straightened myself and reached for my wallet, offering him a beer.
“Look,
man, I don’t want to fight you.”
“Are you trying to be a smart-ass?”
“What?”
“Do you think I can’t buy my own beer?”
“Not at all.”
“Do you think I don’t know what’s going on? That I don’t know what you’re trying to do? Do you think I’m some kind of idiot?”
I said nothing.
“I don’t know where you’re from, bud, but in this country we have a little thing called respect.”
He was drunk; I could smell it on his breath. Sweat gathered on his forehead like beads of fat on a ham. I raised my palms, thinking this would appease him, but he kneed me in the groin. I cried out in pain. He drew his fist back to punch me when a small voice bleated from the back of the crowd.
“Let him go, Mikey.”
It was Eun-ji, back with a fresh drink in her hand. She grabbed Michael by his arm and he went limp. She whispered something in his ear and he let go of my neck. He walked away. I was spared. Except for the injured voice knocking around in my skull.
“Fuck you,” I said.
He stopped in his tracks. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me. I said, fuck you.”
He narrowed his eyes, looking me up and down.
“Fuck you, motherfucker,” I said, louder this time. “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. I do think you’re an idiot, actually. I bet you’re even dumber than you fucking look!”
The light went out of my head, and with it, the entire universe, the dim glow of the bar, the music and dancing and rhapsodic jeers. I woke with a throbbing pain in my face. Eun-ji was kneeling, ministering to my wounds, but not before stealing one last look in Michael Gray’s direction. Something clouded in her eyes. Later that evening—and every evening after that—she would tell me it was nothing; I was crazy.
But I knew that it was there.
* * *
We didn’t make love much that week, or the week after that, and when we did, it was tepid, Eun-ji turning her head.
“It’s him,” I’d say. “I know it. It’s him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m right here.”
She would finish quickly, closing her eyes. I would ask if I was coming over later and she would say, “It’s up to you.” Once, we went an entire day without speaking. I started drinking again—beer and wine in the mornings and a glass of Jim Beam before bed. I went on Facebook to see what she was doing. The last picture was of us on the beach in Aruba, smiling under the sun. Suddenly, in class, she hesitated before taking the seat next to mine. At the library, she closed her books before announcing an incipient cold. Once, she stopped in the middle of our lovemaking just to answer the phone. “Who was it?” I said, freeing a strand of her hair that was clinging to her skin.
She said it was no one.
A month passed. I went to the mall, sampling perfumes, lotions, gourmet chocolates flecked with salt. I wrapped everything up with a bottle of wine. I wrote a letter about how special it was for two people to find each other in a world full of billions, defying all odds. Then I knocked on her door. She didn’t answer. I knocked again. A light went on inside. A pair of shoes scraped the floor before the door opened, slowly, revealing a sliver of Eun-ji’s face.
“Surprise,” I said. “It’s an early birthday present.”
I leaned in to kiss her, but she turned her head. I reached for her hand, but she pulled it away.
“Is everything okay?” I said, though I knew, then, that it wasn’t.
“I wish you would have called, Raj. You can’t just show up here unannounced.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t.”
“But I love you.”
She lowered her gaze.
“Say it,” I said, stepping forward. “Say you love me.”
I was aware of how ridiculous this all looked, how unnecessary I had now become. But there was no turning back.
“Say it.”
“Raj…”
“I want you to say it.”
I grabbed her by the arm this time, squeezing it tight.
“I think you should go.”
“Why?” I said, shouting. “Give me one goddamn reason why.”
She slammed the door in my face. I marched across the street and opened the bottle of wine. I remained in the shadows, waiting for something to happen. Anything. Then the door swung open; Michael Gray emerged. I hurled the bottle of wine. It somersaulted across the sky. Eun-ji came running out of the apartment, screaming at the top of her lungs.
* * *
It was over. I asked Eun-ji if we could be friends—I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her forever—but she said we were never friends to begin with, that that was the problem. It was funny how love could do that: give a person amnesia. A few days later, she was back with Michael Gray. I saw them on the quad together, holding hands. He attended our medical school events and I suspect she attended his law ones. They were a real couple, an example to the rest of our class, and I was just the idiot who got in the way. That was how the story would go. There would be no mention of the bottle of wine that shattered against the doorframe and flung a piece of glass that pierced Michael Gray’s cornea, causing him to wear a patch for the rest of the year.
During my final year of school, I was living in a house with some friends when I walked outside to find that my tires had been slashed. A sick joke, I was told, some freshman’s idea of a prank, but I wondered. When I found toilet paper strewn over our front yard, I was told the house across the street had also been tagged. When egg whites formed a milky crust over the windows, I was pointed in the direction of the sorority house, two blocks over, where eggshells littered the lawn.
* * *
I graduated from medical school. I framed my diploma. I posed for pictures in my cap and gown. I moved to Los Angeles, where I applied for and was accepted into a cardiology program at UCLA. It was there, on a bright summer afternoon, after a happy hour with friends, that I met her: Mona Singh.
She was a NICU fellow. She was Punjabi. She had long sleek hair that fell past her waist. At parties she wore blue eye shadow and dark lipstick the color of plums. We went for hikes in the park, drives up the coast, cocktails in dark restaurants or dive bars or clubs. We shucked oysters under a netting of stars, listening to the soft spatter of ocean waves. Mona lived in a fancy condo, with white lacquered tiles. I lived in a studio with a white refrigerator.
Her parents were jewelers in Bel-Air. On weekends I accompanied her home. Mona’s mother skewered kebabs and her father opened a bottle of wine, and together, we looked up at the stars and thought about how the air had never felt purer, the moon had never looked brighter, how the night had never been as magical as that one, right there, in her parents’ backyard.
On Sundays we shared sections of the paper and listened to music and Mona made blood orange mimosas and we drank them by the pool. Her parents prepared a room for me on the other side of the house, but at night, after everyone had fallen asleep, I snuck over into Mona’s room. She would be waiting for me with a smile on her face, her blouse wide open, her nipples stiff as stones. One night, she was staring into the blue glow of her computer screen when she turned around and smiled.
“Who’s Eun-ji?”
She spun the monitor around so that I saw Eun-ji and me on Facebook, holding hands, a stolen moment, captured among friends. I hadn’t seen her in years, though I’d often clicked on her page. Sometimes I’d type up a tearful message I had neither the inspiration nor the courage to send. Once, I’d dialed her number in the middle of the night, just to listen to the sound of her voice. But that was the past, before I’d met Mona, before my life had changed in ways I never imagined they could. Now, she was nothing more than a fork in the road, a ding in my bumper, a vague image in my rearview mirror, fading away.
* * *
We were married a year later, at a Hilton hotel. Mona wore a red sari. I rode in on a horse. Her parents sprang for a trip to Bora Bora: first
class. We stayed in a hut overlooking a glassy lagoon. We sunbathed and snorkeled and ran laps on the beach. We ate lobster and swordfish and extracted tender meat from crabs, and, when it was all over we returned to a three-bedroom town house in Silver Lake, overlooking the hills. Mona flipped through magazines, ordering sofas, armchairs, crystal-studded lamps, a gilded mirror that was tall enough to touch the ceiling and that we kept at an angle against the wall. She filled the space with her things: her dresses and shoes, her nighties and robes, the hairbrushes that grew matted and dense with each use. I awoke to the scent of her shampoo as she slipped in and out of the bathroom, fastening her earrings or polishing her shoes. We worked at the same hospital, joined the same gym. On Sundays we went hiking and got drunk off gin fizz. Then we rushed home, our hands traveling to the places we had long known, the freckles and blemishes and moles, the hollows we’d kissed a thousand times before. It was the life I had always wanted, the life I had always dreamt of, and then, just like that, it was gone.
* * *
His name was Landon, and he was her trainer. He had the kind of reasonable smile that made you want to punch him in his face, which I did, naturally, after finding out the news. Discovering it, really. It happened on a Sunday. Mona had come home from the gym. I was in the living room, watching TV, when she dropped her handbag on the floor. She went for a shower. I rifled through the bag. To this day, I’m not sure why I did it. Jealousy, maybe; suspicion, sure. But that was it. We were happy. Still, I was aware of what people said. I’d heard the whispers during work. I was there, one Friday evening at a hospital charity function, when an electrocardiogram fellow made a comment about Mona’s breasts. I nearly punched him in the face. But I never thought it would come to this. I found the receipt buried under a pile of her things—tampons, tissues, lipsticks, creams—and smoothed it out over my lap. There was only one item listed: a box of condoms. Mona was on the pill. I threw the bag across the room. I waited for her to emerge from the shower, wet hair clinging to her face, before confronting her in the hall.